#title Beyond the bounds of revolutions
#subtitle Chinese in transnational anarchist networks from the 1920s to the 1950s
#author Morgan William Rocks
#date 2020
#source <[[https://open.library.ubc.ca/soa/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/24/items/1.0395377][open.library.ubc.ca/soa/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/24/items/1.0395377]]>
#lang en
#pubdate 2025-09-30T08:33:42.333Z
#authors Morgan William Rocks
#topics Chinese anarchism, history
#publisher University of British Columbia
#rights © Morgan William Rocks, 2020. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
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; BA, New Mexico State University, 2005
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; MA, New Mexico State University, 2012
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; A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF
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; THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
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; DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
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; THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES
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; (History)
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; THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA
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; (Vancouver)
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; November 2020
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; © Morgan William Rocks, 2020
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; The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the dissertation entitled:
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; Beyond the Bounds of Revolutions: Chinese in Transnational Anarchist Networks from the 1920s to the 1950s
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; submitted by Morgan William Rocks in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History
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; **Examining Committee:**
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; Timothy Cheek, History, UBC
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Supervisor
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; Timothy Brook, History, UBC
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Supervisory Committee Member
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; Glen Peterson, History, UBC
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Supervisory Committee Member
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; Ross King, Asian Studies, UBC
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University Examiner
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; Alison Bailey, Asian Studies, UBC
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University Examiner
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; **Additional Supervisory Committee Members:**
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; Robert Brain, History, UBC
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Supervisory Committee Member
*** Abstract
Modern anarchism came to China in the twentieth century via transnational student networks in Tokyo and Paris. Even as anarchism and anarchists proliferated within China, the transnational links through which it came and the transnationalism of anarchism itself remained. However, scholars have subsumed the narrative of Chinese anarchism under larger ideological issues of nation and state building.
Moving away from such frameworks, this dissertation aims to decouple Chinese anarchists from the nation and to treat anarchism in China not as a mode of thought, but as a set of concrete actors and practices. To analyze Chinese anarchists’ transnational endeavors, the dissertation makes use of recent methodologies of network tracing from the field of Anarchist Studies to both map the dense and often overlapping networks of three important anarchist figures, Ba Jin 巴金 (1904–2005), Ray Jones 刘钟时 (1889–1974), and Lu Jianbo 卢剑波 (1904–1991), and detail the actions these networks produced. Ba Jin operated in France and Shanghai, Lu in Shanghai and Chengdu, and Jones in San Francisco. By looking at the extent, direction, and flow of their various networks, the dissertation argues Chinese anarchists created global connections that situated China and Chinese in an anarchist world stage and reflected modes of existence that were not bounded by the nation or revolution.
Chapter 2 utilizes Ba Jin’s status as a hub within multiple networks to introduce the lines and dots of transnational Chinese anarchist activity. Chapter 3 traces Ray Jones and the anarchist *Pingshe*’s place within a multi-ethnic and trans-Pacific radical environment. Chapter 4 untangles how Ba Jin’s association was used to overshadow the radical transnational pasts of schools in Fujian. Chapter 5 examines Lu Jianbo’s attempts to weave together China’s Anti-Japanese War and Spanish Civil War in a global anti-fascist front. Chapter 6 probes the afterlives of these networks through the stories of two younger anarchists, Darren Kuang Chen and Liu Chuang. In the end, these networks faded with the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), but the connections they left have continued to serve as unconscious templates for later generations of Sinopshere anarchists.
*** Lay Summary
This dissertation examines Chinese in transnational anarchist networks from the 1920s to the 1950s. It uses the experiences and activities of three anarchists, Ba Jin 巴金 (1904–2005), Ray Jones 刘钟时 (1889–1974), and Lu Jianbo 卢剑波 (1904–1991) to explore how Chinese anarchists utilized print and correspondence to connect with Asian, European, North American, and Latin American comrades. The friendships and working relationships fostered by being connected to a global anarchist movement reveals that contrary to previous understandings, of anarchism, it was not just a brief intellectual trend. It was a vital mode of action. In exploring the connections these anarchists made, the dissertation argues that anarchist activities offered Chinese anarchists a means by which to imagine and participate in worlds and communities beyond the Chinese nation-state.
*** Preface
This dissertation is original and independent work by the author, Morgan William Rocks. Portions of Chapter 5 appear in the chapter “An Anarchist Popular Resistance: The *Awakening* and China’s Resistance War at Home and Abroad,” collected in Jonathan Henshaw, Craig A. Smith, and Norman Smith, eds., *Translating the Occupation: The Japanese Invasion of China, 1931–1945* (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2020). Research for the dissertation was carried out in archives in Ann Arbor, Berkeley, and Amsterdam, and made use of numerous digitized archives.
*** List of Figures
Figure 1 – “Library of Ray Jones”, Front
Figure 2 – “Library of Ray Jones”, Back
Figure 3 – *Chongjing*, vol. 1, no 6, Masthead
Figure 4 – *Jingzhe*, vol. 1, no. 3, Front Page
Figure 5 – *Jingzhe*, vol. 2, no. 3, Front Page
*** Acknowledgements
Such an undertaking requires perhaps an explanation of where it came from in addition to the more standard list of who made it possible. I offer both in the hopes that it helps steel the reader for what follows in the main body. Over the course of this project, when discussing the ins and outs of Chinese Anarchists, and the place of Ba Jin among them, numerous colleagues within the field, at least privately, reacted in the following manner, “Anarchists? Didn’t they all disappear by 1930? Weren’t they really just inconsequential? Why talk about them when there are more important matters concerning the Nationalist Party (*Guomindang*, GMD) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)? Why write anything further on Ba Jin? He’s been done to death and his writing isn’t even that great!” All these arguments ring true. The height of Chinese anarchist activities came in the 1920s, and their presence as an influential cluster of political actors and groups was short-lived. The more disciplined Leninist-style party organizations of the GMD and CCP soon overtook the anarchists in organizing intellectuals, workers, and peasants for their causes. In 1927, after the Chiang Kai-shek’s violent dissolution of the first GMD-CCP United Front, anarchists were lumped in as potential Marxist dissidents. For all intents and purposes, they slunk off into the shadows and have been categorized as just another ‘idealist’ group that paved the way for the true religion of Nation and Marxian Historical Law.
In all of this, Ba Jin was embarking on a burgeoning career as a fiction author. Ba Jin was influenced by the anarchism of Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman and others, and infused his stories with anarchist-tinged characters and scenes drawn directly from the historical experiences of anarchists in China. However, he was not the only Chinese anarchist and he was certainly not the most well-spoken, active, or theoretical at that. His fame as an author of stories of passionate youths yearning to break societal chains and later attention from Western scholars and anarchist activists have come to cement his place as the Chinese anarchist par excellence. When Chinese anarchism was discussed in college-level surveys, if at all, Ba Jin was and is inevitably offered up as the representative. Ba Jin’s assumed centrality to the story, and the academic industry that has popped up around his legacy has too often overplayed the anarchist card. So much so, that one of the goals in taking up this project was to have as little to do with Ba Jin as possible in the telling of Chinese anarchists’ stories. Simply put, Ba Jin was boring, and I too wanted to be done with him.
Yet, that did not come to pass. Ba Jin remained an important figure in my research, but in exploring the ins and outs of Chinese anarchist activity, it soon became apparent that his importance lay not in his intellectual stance or contributions, but in his position as a node within increasingly broader networks of Chinese, Asian, and global anarchists. As an anarchist agitator, Ba Jin did not amount to much, but as an active correspondent, translator, publisher, and chronicler, he played an important role in bridging multiple worlds of anarchist activity. He commiserated with Emma Goldman about China’s sad state of affairs in the 1920s and even, with the help of a cohort of anarchist colleagues in Shanghai, attempted to devise a plan for her to tour China. He worked with Chinese anarchists living in San Francisco to organize and publish a trans-Pacific Chinese anarchist journal. He documented in his fiction the efforts of anarchists to operate a set of schools in southern Fujian in the early 1930s. He and other remaining anarchists wrote on the Spanish Civil War as an anarchist-lesson for China’s fight against Japan. After the Second World War, he re-established and expanded his anarchist correspondence networks so as to write essays and histories on anarchism for a Chinese audience. From the 1920s to the early 1950s, Ba Jin’s relevance as an anarchist lay exactly in the way his activities could be read as a lens through which Chinese anarchist networks and undertakings could be brought to light.
Ba Jin, then, was a revealer, and reveal he did. Through Ba Jin’s letters, we learn of numerous Chinese anarchists, his erstwhile companions from his 1927–1928 study abroad in France, Wei Huilin, Bi Xiushao, Lefu, and Wu Kegang. Shanghai-colleagues and conspirators like Shen Zhongjiu. A shadowy bunch of bomb-making, rifle wielding Korean anarchists, exiled in Shanghai and waiting for the chance set off a violent anti-Japanese resistance. Devoted educators and would-be writers of *belles lettres* such as Li Ni, Chen Fanyu, and Ye Feiying, who he met in Fujian. Most of all, Ba Jin’s correspondence and writings bring to the fore the activities of anarchists whose commitment to anarchist ideas and activities resonate in the broader Chinese present: Lu Jianbo, Ray Jones, and Liang Piyun.
Ultimately, these three figures are the true protagonists of this dissertation, not Ba Jin. Likewise, in Peter Zarrow’s *Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture*, Arif Dirlik’s *Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution*, Edward Krebs’s *Shifu, the Soul of Chinese Anarchism* as well as Robert Scalapino and George Yu’s *Chinese Anarchism*, the four major English-language monographs on Chinese anarchists, Ba Jin is not counted among the major Chinese anarchist figures. He shows up, if at all, as a brief figure on the periphery. In these narratives, Li Shizeng, Wu Zhihui, Liu Shipei, and Shifu are the main characters who shape anarchism’s reception in China early in the century. However, the focus of these books is the intellectual origins and influences of anarchism in China. These are intellectual histories and the actions anarchists took in support of their beliefs are covered in terms of their ideological output—namely the polemics that filled the journals they published. What Chinese anarchists did on the ground, the groups they formed, and the concrete, daily practices in which they engaged recede into the backgrounds. What mattered was anarchism’s presence as an organized intellectual movement/resource in competition with Nationalist GMD and the Marxist-Leninist CCP. Taken this way, Chinese anarchism’s story cannot be but closed. They lost. However, just as Chinese anarchism is not the story of Ba Jin, it is also not just the story of Chinese anarchists as a party in contention with other organized political groupings.
Ba Jin merely provides the narrative clues to bring out Chinese anarchists’ stories as well as the stories of what they did when they were doing anarchism. What this dissertation hopes to make clear is that Chinese anarchist activity went beyond the polemics and intellectual content contained in the journals that anarchists printed. To even bring their journals to print, Chinese anarchists relied on communications networks set up through various overseas communities; they made constant use of the post and wire services to send and receive news and printed materials; the founded and ran bookshops, printshops, and centers through which they distributed their publications, set up meetings, and held lectures; they established schools and new village societies that aimed to instill anarchist ideals of social equality, free association, and cosmopolitanism into generations of students. In these activities, anarchists and anarchist influenced actors of widely different views participated, and as these divergent actors and undertakings inhabited a spectrum of political leanings, the purity of their ideology and identity as well as the steadfastness of the organizations from which they arose seems less important. Of course, for Chinese anarchists, intellectual content and organizations mattered, but as anarchists, they were less wedded to labyrinthine bureaucracies and the precision of their thought than, say, the CCP. The rationality for anarchist action lay more in the actions themselves.
By focusing on the practices of Chinese anarchism, this dissertation aims to ‘make sense’ of what Chinese anarchism was and why it matters. Davide Turcato, writing on Errico Malatesta and Italian anarchism, has argued that ‘making sense of anarchism’ requires looking past the apparently obvious narrative to allow for the obscure.[1] In the case of Chinese anarchists, this entails exploring what anarchists were doing behind the narratives of national revolution and the rise of Bolshevist parties, and beyond the spectacle of urbanization and the construction of a modern Chinese state. What were the institutions they built for themselves, how did they organize, and how did they apply anarchist principles in their daily lives? A related question to this is how globally connected Chinese and anarchist networks made this possible. How did they correspond with their international anarchist brethren and did they interact on an equal basis? A final question would be how anarchists saw themselves. In the mid-1930s, Ba Jin once remarked that anarchists were silently toiling in the fields and held no interest in engaging in publicized literary or theoretical debates. If so, for what reasons would anarchists choose to continue in relative obscurity, and was their obscurity one reason they were able to last into the early 1950s? These investigations of anarchist practice in China acknowledge anarchists’ lack of influence inside China, but it contends that this lack of influence did not make anarchism any less meaningful to those who practiced it. Their efforts mattered and they were truly concerned about China’s fate as well as that of the world. Ultimately, the story of Chinese anarchists offers a window into the lives and actions of a diverse group of individuals, a group of individuals who connected locally and globally, and who represented one of many pathways available for committed Chinese who wished to change their world.
And now for the gratitude. The writing of this dissertation was made possible by the kindness, support, and intellectual sharing of numerous individuals and institutions. My adviser, Timothy Cheek has been instrumental in engaging me in discussions of the heart and head, which is doubly important when choosing to write anarchists who have been written off. He was always there to listen, point out key questions, quote timely lyrics, and encourage opportunities in the usual way of presenting at conferences, and the not so usual form of doing something almost completely different and collaboratively translating key Chinese intellectuals with peers from the PRC. He is the consummate adviser for those students who occupy nebulous spaces within academia. My supervisory committee has been stellar in providing feedback and prompting new lines of inquiry. Timothy Brook has been an invaluable resource and gracious in the time he has engaged me in conversation. It was in his public history course that my ideas of anarchist networks first formed. Glen Peterson’s comments and suggestions have encouraged future research directions. Bob Brain has pushed me to think deeply on what it is that anarchists do and why their transnational connections matter. Rebecca Karl, in her role as external examiner, offered encouragement and direction for where to take the networks I sketched out.
The university examiners, Ross King and Alison Bailey, reminded me to not forget Asia. Other individuals, too many to name, at UBC have been made this experience unforgettable. Professors Michel Ducharme, Paul Krause, Alejandra Bronfman, Bruce Rusk, and others have listened patiently to my long and often incoherent ramblings. Vitaly Timofiev, who I TA’d for after first arriving in 2013 was the best possible introduction to Vancouver. Peers and friends in the department, Jorge Carrillo, Dylan Burrows, Tom Peotto, Stephen Hay, Ty Parandela, Mark Werner, Edgar Liao and more all made UBC’s history department perhaps the most collegial experience I have ever had. Special consideration goes to WANG XIAN!!!, Sarah Bramao-Ramos, Sarah Basham, Eric Becklin, Jonathan Henshaw, Craig Smith, Matthew Galway, Anna Belogurova, and the extended China Cult. Also, this last year would not have been the same without the CCR Cabal: Guo Li, Yao Jiaqi, Kuang Yingqiu, The (Far Away) Emperor, Weng Wenjie, Melissa Tan (still have your kneecaps?), and our very dear Gan Dada, Nathan. Researching anarchism has meant the opportunity to reach out to a variety of scholars across the world. Arif Dirlik, Peter Zarrow, Kate Zhou, Jacob Eyferth, Brooks Jessup, Amanda Schuman and others have all provided invaluable opinions and guidance. Kenyon Zimmer, Constance Bantman, Jesse Cohn, and Ole Birk Laursen have helped to fill in the gaps on wider global anarchist communities. Of course, librarians and archivists have all played their part.
Julie Herrada at the Joseph Labadie Collection in Ann Arbor and Sine Hwang-Jensen at the Asian American Studies Collection in Berkeley have both provided essential aid at key moments. The staff at International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam went above and beyond. A special thanks to the people at the Bibliothek der Freien who have put together a master list of archives and groups that have digitized open access collections of anarchist materials. The anarchist web made this dissertation possible and who knows how better it could be if I actually had the time to appreciate it.
A final thanks to Ken Hammond, Iñigo Garcia- Bryce, Andrea Orzoff, Elvira Masson, Paul Lester, Nathan Brooks, and others at NMSU who all started me on this journey. To Howard Goodman, thank you for keeping the faith. To Will, you still suck. To Tony Jaramillo, your calls kept me sane. To Eric, for the home in Seoul and Beijing. To Danny Perry, we will always have Peter Piper’s. To Patrick and Ronnie, someday we will make it back to Tucson. To Rafa and Finom, thank you for the safe space that relit my enthusiasm, for allowing Hugo the run of the place and the occasional pilfered loaf of bread, and for taking most of my books.
Research was made possible by a 4YF Fellowship, the Pan Tianshou Foundation, the Fukien Chinese Association, and numerous grants and fellowships from the UBC History Department. A necessary thanks in all this to Jason Wu. Of course, all errors lie with me.
*** Dedication
This dissertation is dedicated to my family. My father and mother, David and Lorraine Rocks, have done so much and have always been there. My sister Jessica has been a constant source of support and probably has a lock on the ‘Best Auntie Ever’ award. Al and Brady are have shown me what it means to be a brother. Jason is probably the person I secretly would like to be. Uncle Duke, Aunt Cindy, and Matt have made living in Texas better than it has any right to be. Finally, to April and Hugo. Both of you are my harbor, and all this would not have been possible without your love, prodding, and support. And to Hugo, thank you for making the typing room a place of joy and keeping me to sane working hours. I will get off the chair. It is my turn now.
** Chapter 1 — Introduction: Anarchism, Networks, and Beyond
*** Setting the Scene
Anarchism has perhaps been the most transnational of thought systems and practices to emerge in the modern era. Anarchists have long physically, mentally, and emotionally crossed territorial barriers in fraternizing and conspiring with like-minded associates to revolutionize and transform the world, and it should be no surprise then that anarchists in China engaged in these transnational communities as well. Let us now set a scene.
Tucked away on page fourteen in the Monday, August 15, 1927 edition of the *North China Daily News* lay a printed copy of a letter by the Chinese Anarchist Youth Federation directed to the United States minister in China. The paper had been asked by the young anarchists to help publish their cause, which it noted in its introduction. In the letter, the group, politely, though “filled with indignation at the maladministration of the American judicial machinery” demanded the immediate release of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian anarchists set to be executed in Massachusetts for their part in a robbery and murder in 1920.[2] The anarchists also demanded the dismissal of the judge who adjudicated the original trial, Webster Thayer.[3] The following day, *The China Press*, another important English-language Shanghai newspaper, reprinted a brief story from the *Shanghai Mainichi* on the Chinese Anarchist Youth Federation’s protests. This piece, minus the reprinting of the letter, gave a brief summation of the anarchists’ demands and also noted that the anarchists had been handing out numerous pamphlets addressing their protests for the condemned Italian anarchist agitators. It further added speculation about a recent discovery of a stockpile of arms discovered in the Zhabei district. Given the timing of the anarchist protests and the discovery of this stash of weapons, the writers of the story believed that Chinese anarchists were possibly planning a violent insurgency.[4]
The next month, the Chinese Anarchist Youth Federation appeared once more in the pages of *The China Press*. This time, they railed against the 1927 Far Eastern Olympic Games being held in Shanghai and the hypocrisy and apathy displayed by China’s populace in celebrating the games in the wake of the just completed, so-called National Revolution led by the Guomindang (GMD).[5] The editors of *The China Press* chose to editorialize and mock the scope of the anarchists’ diatribe, but their tone belied both the breadth of the anarchists’ scope and the intensity and timeliness of their politics. The range and seriousness of the Chinese Anarchist Youth Federation’s activities were even more pertinent when one considers that their entire existence was later described as empty talk by one of their leading members.[6]
English language readers of *The China Press* and the *North China Daily News* would have also noted that stories of the Chinese Anarchist Youth Federation’s protests against the Sacco and Vanzetti executions and the Far East Olympics shared space with stories on Sun Chuanfang’s battles against GMD forces as well as Chiang Kai-shek’s order to have all capital punishment sentences under martial law to be reviewed by central headquarters and the Nationalist government’s pending imposition of a national tariff.[7] What this shows is that while discussed dismissively in the papers, anarchists were still given a voice, a platform, and exposure. Awareness of anarchist activities were part and parcel of the everyday lived experience in Republican China, and for those anarchist activists who performed propaganda work and other revolutionary activities, such awareness mattered. Anarchists in China spent great efforts in publishing, setting up social spaces, and developing international communications networks to build their presence. They were in communication with the world as much as they were communicating with themselves.
During the 1920s, anarchist and anarchist-inspired groups existed throughout China. Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, being the major metropolitan areas, all had numerous anarchist groups that engaged in a wide variety of activities. Best known among these was perhaps the anarchist National Labor University, founded in Shanghai in 1927. The Labor University, as historians have shown, was the brainchild of anarchists and anarchist-influenced educators with connections to the GMD. This group of individuals sought to combine mental and physical exertion and to extend education to all classes of students, including workers and the impoverished, in an effort to lay the ideological ground for future revolutionary generations.[8] But anarchist activity in China had spread far beyond the country’s elite cosmopolitan centers.[9] Anarchist groups in Hunan published warnings against complacency in Shanghai’s *Minfeng* 《民锋》 , reminding anarchist comrades, “Even though the old warlords have nearly all been toppled, [we] now still suffer oppression from the new warlords!”[10] Their presence and activities in China were further acknowledged through government suppression and censorship. Local police and government agents cracked down on anarchist and other left-wing agitation, shutting down presses and bookstores, and arresting distributors and anarchist society members. Even though anarchists did not suffer the exact fate of communists and their sympathizers in the wake of Chiang Kai-shek’s bloody sundering of the GMD-Chinese Communist Party (CCP) United Front in April of 1927, they still felt the fist of GMD repression.[11] In all seriousness, the extent of anarchist activities against the Nationalist state in China in the late 1920s was considered enough of a threat to warrant intervention.[12]
Anarchist praxis, moreover, did not limit itself to the intellectual debates and projects, educational endeavors, and communitarian living experiments taking place within China. Anarchist activities by groups like the Chinese Anarchist Youth Federation looked beyond China and its immediate concerns. Their involvement in protesting the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti ably demonstrated their transnational ties and orientation, and even if the pressers in *The China Press* and *North China Daily News* left this unstated, its implications were picked up elsewhere, in unexpected manners.[13] The anarchist movement in China had longstanding connections with anarchist groups and agitators in Japan, Korea, and other neighboring countries. Shanghai, in particular, was a heady confluence of a larger East Asian scene. Japanese, Korean, and Chinese anarchists organized, published, and plotted together in the confines of the International Settlements.[14] Against one plot, Japanese and Chinese police bureaus worked together in uncovering a bomb plot by Japanese anarchists staying in Shanghai. Three individuals were implicated. The plot, according to a story in the *Sin Wan Pao* was to bomb Japanese embassies in Qingdao, Tianjin, Shanghai, and other important cities and to assassinate important political and business figures. After the arrests of the plotters, stacks of propaganda and other written materials were discovered and confiscated. The three Japanese anarchists were summarily deported, but unfortunately, the story in the papers ended there.[15] Bombing and murder plots were not the only intrigues in which Chinese and their East Asian anarchist comrades engaged. In 1928, a Japanese post office in Kyushu discovered an attempt to cash four million yuan in counterfeit bills of exchange. These counterfeits were traced to similar attempts in Beijing and involved a number of Chinese, Taiwanese, Korean, and Japanese anarchists belonging to the East Asian Anarchist Federation.[16]
Further abroad, in October of 1927, a Spanish-language manifesto of the Chinese Anarchist Youth Federation appeared in the Barcelona-based *La Revista Blanca*.[17] The appearance of the group’s manifesto was no accident either, as it appears they, through the efforts of young Sichuanese anarchist, Lu Jianbo, had been in regular correspondence with *La Revista Blanca* for over a year.[18] The anarchists’ manifesto also appeared both in the Tampico, Mexicobased anarchist journal, *Avante*, and in San Francisco’s *L’Emancipazione* the following month.[19] Based on existing evidence, it is clear that Lu Jianbo and the Chinese Anarchist Youth Federation had considerable ties to Spanish-speaking anarchists in the Americas and Europe, particularly with Latino and Hispanic anarchists operating in Steubenville, Ohio and Buenos Aires, Argentina.[20] It was through these connections that Lu participated in a global survey on the state of the international anarchist movement that appeared in 1927.[21] Through these Spanish-speaking connections, the Chinese Anarchist Youth Federation informed their global revolutionary comrades on the state of China’s revolution. More importantly, these connections, along with the notices appearing in the English-speaking press in China, provided a broader sense of both what Chinese anarchists felt at stake and how they viewed their actions as integrated with global social and political revolutions.
Chinese participation in transnational anarchist networks reveals how anarchist thought and practices provided a means by which Chinese could think and act on their idealized societies without having to always return to the nation or state. A.C. Graham, in the introduction to *The Disputers of the T’ao*, stated that Chinese political and philosophical thought was premised on there always being some form of state or polity through which individuals were marshalled and given purpose.[22] The current historiography of China’s twentieth-century revolutions as well as the guiding lines of the two revolutionary parties, the GMD and CCP certainly adhered to this.[23] Yet, Rebeca Karl has also argued that it was indeed possible for Chinese to join together with others to imagine worlds without states.[24] What the anarchists, and their focus on global revolution and local communities represent is perhaps not a direct challenge—they were, in the end, marginal figures—but a personal ethos, a praxis by which they found connections, fit, and transformative opportunities they could pursue for themselves and others.[25] Chinese anarchists connected with Euro-American anarchists as part of a global community, they travelled pre-existing corridors of migration and trade into Southeast Asia (the Nanyang 南洋) and the United States, they participated in the high tide of interwar globalization as counterweights to internationalizing statist institutions, and they took up those globalizing efforts again, however briefly, at the end of the Second World War, when states were further cemented as the arbiters of everything local, national, and global. Examining the lives and actions of Chinese in transnational anarchist networks pushes scholars to rethink how Chinese actors approached questions of the ‘nation-state’, and how Chinese transnationals could think and act beyond those states that would stake claims upon and discipline them. It also forces scholars to think of Chinese anarchist experience on a global scale and not just the story of a few core individuals. Chinese in anarchist transnational networks represent possibilities of how Chinese could connect with their global peers in imagining a radically transformed world and leave behind legacies in people, print, and institutions that survive, in no matter how altered a form, as resources for those who would do so today.
*** The Scene and its Significance
As seen above, anarchism in China reflected not just Chinese, but global aspirations. For much of the first half of the twentieth century, it provided a vocabulary by which Chinese anarchists could re-imagine and reshape Chinese society into something more equal, just, and fair. But more than that, anarchism provided its Chinese adherents a set of practices through which to organize and navigate their lived experiences in their immediate communities and larger social environments. Internationally, anarchism’s vocabularies and practices connected Chinese anarchists to similar movements across Asia, Europe, and the Americas, providing an outlet through which they could think beyond both nation and state. Chinese anarchists enthusiastically corresponded with their global counterparts so as to both learn from different experiences and to strengthen the connections of China’s own struggles against colonialism, imperialism, and political and economic despotism with comparable efforts throughout the world.
In essence, for Chinese anarchists, anarchism was a matter of networks, publications, and shared social space in which and through which to reform society and themselves. They coordinated their social lives around anarchist bookshops, schools, hospitals, union guilds, village self-defense bands, and other social institutions that attempted to redefine how individuals interacted with their surroundings. From these local communities, they built ties and bonds with anarchist comrades and fellow travelers scattered across the globe. Of course, the scope of their activities changed as the social and economic uncertainty of the late 1920s, the political struggles of the GMD and CCP in the 1930s, and the Japanese invasion in 1937, limited or closed down lines of communication and space for anarchist activities. Nonetheless, mapping the global networks, journals, and social spaces that anarchists in China built, from Shanghai to Tokyo, to San Francisco, to Havana, to Paris, helps to demonstrate not just anarchism’s social and global reach in China, but just how invested individuals in China could be in seeking to transform their own society beyond the state and engaging in a revolutionary world movement as global denizens.
Three Chinese anarchists, Ba Jin 巴金 (1904–2005), Liu Zhongshi 刘钟时 (1889–1979), also known as Ray Jones, and Lu Jianbo 卢剑波 (1904–1991) aptly demonstrate the dynamics of the social spaces and networks Chinese anarchists created. Active as anarchists from the 1920s to at least the early 1950s, the trio formed a triangle of sorts, with Ba Jin living in Shanghai, Lu Jianbo in Shanghai and later Chengdu, and Jones operating in San Francisco. The span of their anarchist activities mirrored the vicissitudes that Anarchist spaces and networks faced in China. In the 1920s and early 1930s, they corresponded with each other and nurtured a number of anarchist associations, with Lu Jianbo’s Minfengshe 民锋社, or People’s Vanguard Society (1925–1928), and Ba Jin and Ray Jones’s trans-Pacific collaboration, the Pingshe 平社, or Equality Society (1926–1930) recognized as two of their more prominent groups.[26] In the 1930s, as the GMD and CCP came to organizationally and politically dominate discussion of how to revolutionize China, the social spaces available to anarchists decreased. However, anarchists continued to be active, thought in much changed or decreased capacities.
From 1937 to 1940, during the first years of the Anti-Japanese Resistance War, Lu Jianbo as editor, and Ba Jin as minor contributor, worked together on *Jingzhe* 《惊蛰》, a journal that advocated anarchist resistance to Japanese invasion, promoted revolution against the corrupt GMD state and opportunistic CCP, and sought Chinese alliance with broader anarchist-led anti-fascist movements in Europe and the Americas. After 1945, Ba Jin, Lu Jianbo, and Ray Jones participated in worldwide efforts to reconstitute global anarchist networks ravaged by war and political repression. As China’s fate seemingly hung in the hands of the nationalists and communists, this took the form of the exchanging and preservation of anarchist knowledge, with Ba Jin and Jones working with anarchist librarian, Agnes Inglis (1870–1952), to archive Chinese anarchist texts at the University of Michigan. Jones brought further international connections with his ties to Bay Area Italian anarchist groups, ties he had been cultivating since at least 1928, when he was arrested for handing out leaflets protesting the deportation of Armando Borghi (1882–1968), an Italian anarchist militant.[27] Lu Jianbo utilized his connections with Spanishlanguage anarchists in order to solicit funds and materials to rebuild anarchist movements in China. Ba Jin, Lu Jianbo, and Jones’s efforts serve as an example of not only how Chinese anarchists existed with surrounding communities and interests, but also how they actively sought links with other international anarchists and movements.
In essence, Ba Jin, Ray Jones, and Lu Jianbo’s efforts to create and define local anarchist spaces and practices were coterminous with the global networks they forged. In placing these and other Chinese anarchist networks, publications, and social spaces in the historical context of the first four decades of the twentieth century, this dissertation sees anarchism as a generative force in discussions and attempts to not only reform Chinese society, but to go beyond concerns of China as a nation-state and connect Chinese to larger global communities. Moreover, in examining Chinese anarchist networks, publications, and social spaces, this project observes that as the political and social projects of the Guomindang (GMD) and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took precedence in the late 1920s and 30s, anarchism still provided an opening for theorizing how to imagine political action beyond the state. Anarchist engagement may have changed, larger social experiments such as schools and village mutual aid societies were no longer possible, but action through the printing, translation, dissemination, and preservation of anarchist knowledge remained viable. Ba Jin, Lu Jianbo, and Ray Jones’s anarchist practices weathered the GMD, CCP, and the Anti-Japanese Resistance War, and their practice, along with the spaces and networks in which they participated continued to evolve as well. These networks, publications, and social spaces, and how they mutated during the first half of the twentieth century, reveal just how intensely Ba Jin, Lu Jianbo, Jones and other Chinese anarchists sought to transform their own lives and the national and international orders around them.
*** Historiographical Backgrounds – Anarchism and Anarchism in China
Anarchism, as an idea/-ism, as a movement, as a set of practices, and as an object of study has presented scholars numerous contradictions. Defined simply, anarchism is a modern ideology that advocates the abolition of government and all systems of hierarchy, the free and voluntary association of individuals in the supplying of material needs, and the respect for individual liberty. It developed amid intense mid-nineteenth century European debates on social reform and revolution that grew out of industrialization, imperial expansion, and state building projects. Its intellectual and textual pantheon centers on the thoughts and writings of the likes of William Godwin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Max Stirner, Mikhail Bakunin, Piotr Kropotkin, and others. Its political identity was birthed in factional struggles among contending socialist camps, its own commitment to strict anti-authoritarianism, internationalism, its acceptance and promotion of revolutionary violence, and the intense government repression its adherents suffered. This is the basic narrative that has existed, from the classic accounts of George
Woodcock and James Joll, to a more modern iteration in the writing of Alexander Butterworth.[28] However, because of its anti-authoritarian principles, and because it possessed no central body to maintain orthodoxy, anarchism became a big tent of diverse, but like-minded ideologies, movements, and practices that did not always adhere to the neatly delineated story above.[29] First, although its main theorists and practitioners were peripatetic wanderers and exiles who were in conflict with the nation-state and preached world revolution, historians have mainly categorized anarchist movements as tied to specific locations, such as Spain, Russia, Italy, or France.[30] Recently, though while reaffirming the importance of analysis of anarchist movements at the national level, scholars of anarchism have aimed to explore the various means through which anarchists practiced and pursued internationalism.[31] Younger scholars, such as Davide Turcato, who studies transnational Italian anarchists, have emphasized that as a movement, anarchism operated as a geographically dispersed network, with groups and cells disbanding, moving, reforming, and expanding their operations in response to the political climate of a given locality.[32] In his example, militant anarchist activity in Italy did not end during periods of political repression; it merely changed locations and focused more on propaganda work than on violent insurrection.[33] In essence, Turcato is arguing for the study of Italian anarchists and not necessarily Italian anarchism.
Turcato’s arguments are echoed in the research of Kirwin Shaffer, a historian of anarchism in the early twentieth-century Caribbean, and Constance Bantman, who researches French anarchists in Great Britain. Like Turcato, they stress that constant circulation within anarchist circles compels historians to approach these groups as diffuse organizations that were continuously building new ties with anarchists in different regions, countries, and hemispheres.[34] For example, in his work, Shaffer uses the descriptor of “lines and dots” to visualize a map of the constantly changing connections between Latin American and European anarchists living and operating throughout the Americas.[35] Such analysis, as Turcato, Shaffer, and Bantman contend, is critical in understanding the range of actions available to anarchists at a given time.
Key in Turcato, Shaffer, and Bantman’s theses are the immigrant and communications networks that facilitated the movement of people and ideas. Claudio Lomnitz and David Dorado Romo’s writings on transnational communities on the US-Mexico border at the turn of the twentieth century, and Jose C. Moya’s exploration of migrant circuits between Argentina and Spain have probed how radical workers and revolutionists carried anarchist practices across national boundaries, creating new and distinctive revolutionary communities that were constantly in motion, with individuals, publications, and correspondence traveling back and forth.[36] Kenyon Zimmer’s research on anarchist activists in the United States has expanded and added depth to the functioning of these networks in the spread of anarchism. In Zimmer’s estimation, obviously, a number of anarchist migrants and exiles to America brought their revolutionary creeds and organizational connections with them, but a more important factor was the discrimination and exploitative labor conditions experienced by immigrant communities there. It was shared persecution and hardship in the United States that made anarchism an attractive choice to immigrants.[37] In all of these studies, though anarchist intellectual figures play an important role in disseminating anarchism, the emphasis shifted to what anarchists did and how anarchism and anarchists became embedded in different kinds of transnational communities.[38] This brings us to a second issue. The focus by younger scholars on the social and cultural history of anarchism diverges from earlier studies on, for lack of a better of a term, anarchist intellectual elites. Along with earlier studies on anarchists in various national settings, biographies and intellectual histories of leading anarchist figures, such as Kropotkin, Bakunin, Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman and others have played an outsized role in the historiography.[39] Current scholars who research anarchism and anarchist movements argue that while earlier intellectual histories were important in fleshing out the idea of anarchism, they did not really account for the majority of individuals who practiced and lived anarchism. Lucien van der Walt and Michael Schmidt, authors of what is currently considered an authoritative work (though still hotly contested) on anarchist history, place organizing by industrial and agricultural workers at the center of their narrative.[40] Echoing Turcato’s arguments about the importance of the press, Kathy Ferguson has contended that anarchist practice was embodied in the physical act of printmaking and typesetting in the figure of the 19th century journeyman printer.[41] Others still have sought to rethink how anarchism as an ideology and practice affects the writing of anarchist history, seeking a more balanced approach between intellectual and social histories of anarchism, asserting that the history of anarchism is one of both sages and movements.[42]
A final difficulty in the historiography these younger anarchist scholars seek to reconsider is the centrality of violence in popular conceptions of anarchist movements. Earlier discussions of anarchism’s advocation of revolutionary violence has seen this either as a paradox to be solved or as something that paled in comparison to the repressive violence meted out to anarchists by the state.[43] Zimmer, Bantman, Shaffer, and others all acknowledge the role of violence, both in anarchist actions and in government repression. However, in seeking to focus on anarchism as a lived experience, they seek to broaden its history beyond that of an ideal. In so doing, they aim to provide analytic space to explore the social spaces in which anarchists lived and worked. A prominent example of this is Tom Goyens’s study of the social spaces inhabited by German anarchists in late nineteenth-century New York, which demonstrates how New York-based German anarchists cemented their anarchist identities through beer hall gatherings, community theater performances, lectures, and other aspects of social life.[44] Simply put, anarchists were more than revolutionary insurrectionists, they were members of interlocking networks of local, regional, and transnational communities that aimed to put their beliefs into practice.
The historiography of anarchism and anarchists in China, though retaining these same conundrums, first had to respond to both broader contours of Chinese history and the particular concerns Chinese faced. As scholars have identified, the old system anarchists and other radicals and reformers sought to replace was a hodgepodge of various thought ways, commonly grouped under the rubric of Confucian ideology, and had served as the synthesizer for various discourses of political, cultural, and state power for over two millennia. But, in the nineteenth century, as China’s political, economic, and social situation buckled under crises of imperialist aggression, civil war, social upheaval, economic and natural disaster, it lost institutional force. From the last half of the century, reformers and radicals soon attacked various aspects of Confucian ideology and sought to either re-purpose it to new, modern agendas, or do away with it altogether.[45] Though these radicals and reformers themselves still operated within a Confucian discourse, their mental vocabularies and concepts were changing.[46] New ideas of citizenship, statehood, social justice, and evolution, filtered through Europe, the United States, and Japan, came to dominate debates on how to improve China’s situation.[47] These new Western derived concepts combined with existing concepts and ways of thinking in China to create new vocabularies of social and political expression.
Anarchism first came to Asia and China in the first decade of the twentieth century through these transnational channels.[48] Martin Bernal, Robert Scalapino, George Yu and others have identified how, at the beginning of the twentieth century, as reformers like Liang Qichao looked to European reporting on anarchism and other socialisms for strategies and means they could adopt and employ in reforming or revolutionizing the moribund Qing dynasty, Chinese students living in Tokyo and Paris collaborated with international colleagues to translate and introduce anarchist thought to Chinese audiences. In both Tokyo and Paris, overseas Chinese student responded to anarchism as a radical new solution to China’s seemingly intractable problems, as they felt those old vocabularies and practices that held together Chinese politics, society, and culture under millennia of dynastic rule could not cope with massive population growth, political ineffectiveness, natural disasters, economic turbulence, and Euro-American imperialist incursions. It provided a means of organizing society that would do away with the moribund hierarchies that kept Chinese in subservience to family, state, and imperialist powers. Furthermore, in the minds of those Chinese who were to become anarchists, anarchism provided the necessary tools to reconstruct not only Chinese society, but also that of the world, creating the possibility of a universal community.
As historians have noted, anarchism introduced a number of new social and political concepts to China, contributing numerous ideas and theories that added an ever-evolving world view. Anarchists, for example, were among the first groups in China to take Western feminist theory and apply it to gender relations in China.[49] Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, anarchism remained a powerful force, directly or indirectly influencing numerous individuals and groups to take up revolutionary causes. The anarchist-organized Diligent Work-Frugal Study 勤工俭学 program sent hundreds of Chinese students to France where many became active in revolutionary activism and some, such as Deng Xiaoping (1904–1997), would later occupy important positions in the CCP.[50] Anarchist ideology even lay behind the efforts of Buddhist modernizers aiming to reinvigorate their doctrines.[51] It was an ideology that emphatically influenced political and social actions, and, more importantly, profoundly shaped the later radical discourses of the CCP and GMD, as numerous anarchists, for a time, held key positions in both organizations.[52]
Alongside the influence of its political and social concepts, anarchism’s most lasting contributions perhaps are its stress on the reorganization of social space and its internationalist outlook. In addition to overseas work-study groups, Chinese anarchists participated in a plethora of social experiments, ranging from moral societies, village mutual aid organizations, to progressive schools that combined mental and manual labor.[53] These spaces and activities also included journals, bookstores, print shops, and other ventures. Through their actions, anarchists firmly embedded themselves within their larger environments creating and re-adapting their surrounding social spaces.
Analyzing these contexts of how modern anarchism came to China and how it operated, Peter Zarrow and Arif Dirlik have offered perhaps the most representative overviews. Both agree that anarchist thought played a significant role through the 1920s in shaping revolutionary imaginaries about how a future China should look. Though they differ in how each situates anarchism’s fit to Chinese circumstances (Zarrow stresses both the ways in which Chinese anarchists read continuity between anarchism and existing modes of political thought in China and the ways in which anarchism represented modernity and science, while Dirlik emphasizes anarchism’s future-oriented universality), for both authors, anarchism’s story in China is in its relationship to the Chinese nation.[54] These tensions between anarchism and anarchists’ transnational proclivities and the pressing need felt by Chinese to address China’s national crises crisscross a number of questions and historiographical concerns.
As identified above, one of the main questions that has animated the historiography of twentieth-century China has been tensions in its transformation from an empire to a nation-state. Scholars like John Fitzgerald and Henrietta Harrison have looked at this in terms of Chinese being awakened to new socio-political realities and identities.[55] Indeed, the question of how to conceive of a world not led by the dynastic order was something that many agonized over. Yet, Chinese were adjusting to transformed political and social realities before the Qing fell. As Prasenjit Duara has shown, the effects of the 1905 New Laws led to new types of hierarchies and relationships that locals had to navigate.[56] Further, as Duara has also shown, this question was not something that existed only within China. China’s new identity as a nation-state was something that happened in a transnational context.[57] Rebecca Karl has elaborated on this further in examining how Chinese wrote colonial realities onto its new modes of identity and history.[58] Yet, just limiting Chinese imaginings to the state or nation occludes other possibilities of what Chinese, including anarchists, were capable of envisioning and how they went about acting upon their visions.
This tension between the national and transnational certainly bled into the lives of the millions of Chinese overseas and the ways in which the Qing court, reformers, and radicals staked claims on their loyalties. Yet, as the likes of Wang Gungwu and Leander Seah have argued, it would be foolish to consider these Chinese overseas automatically as part of a China writ large.[59] Chinese overseas communities had multiple identities that varied between a patriotic attachment to a focus on their own local positions. Adam McKeown, in his critique of Wang Gungwu’s scale of Chinese overseas identity has emphasized that not only were their multiple Chinese overseas communities, but there were multiple China’s as well.[60] This is something that Seah has taken even further in emphasizing not transnationalism, but transregionalism.[61]
But, to take Seah and McKeown’s arguments about primary and secondary nodal points further, we need to also look at how Chinese transnational communities extended their networks beyond their ethnic compatriots and their immediate needs.[62] Chinese, both in China and overseas, participated in a plethora of transnational movements that arose from their experiences as migrants and their exposure to larger, global circumstances. Chinese of all stripes participated in various forms of pan-Asianism, global fascism and anti-fascism, and internationalist communism as both subjects and objects.[63] Together, among themselves and with international comrades, they built world-spanning friendships of the type Leela Gandhi has explored among British and Indian radicals.[64] The histories of transnational Chinese anarchist activity were certainly connected to these various strands and can greatly enrich our understandings of Chinese experience in the world.
As such, Dirlik and other scholars examining anarchism in China have begun to more strongly emphasize the internationalist scope of anarchism in China. As Dirlik and others have argued, Chinese anarchists sought to not only build a movement focused on China, but to also establish regional and global associations and networks with anarchists in Asia and beyond.[65] This recognition has been amplified in the work of Gotelind Müller-Saini, who contends that Chinese anarchists held a dual appreciation for national and international issues.[66] More broadly, historians are now acknowledging the presence of Chinese actors in international left-wing and radical movements, and recently they have begun to plumb the personal friendships and ties among Chinese and international activists created in these processes.[67] In this sense, the study of anarchism in China highlights Chinese anarchists as integral members of a larger fraternity of transnationalist, internationalist-minded activists.
This shift to the transnational in the study of Chinese anarchists brings with it the possibility of further linking its historiography with studies done by Zimmer, Bantman, and Shaffer on transnational, multi-ethnic anarchist communities.[68] Their emphasis on personal connection among multi-ethnic anarchist communities poses wider implications for the study of international anarchism and cross-cultural contact. Moreover, such emphasis also provides analytic space to explore the social spaces in which anarchists lived and worked.[69] Key to these social experiments and exploratory ventures were communication networks. Domestically, these networks were vital as anarchists were never static. Numerous anarchists in China circulated from their small, rural villages and towns to larger provincial capitals like Chongqing in Sichuan, to major metropolitan areas such as Beijing, Guangzhou, and Shanghai.[70] In making these circuits, anarchists came into contact with numerous fellow ideological travelers and built up extensive national correspondence networks. Chinese anarchists, especially while in Shanghai and Beijing, also came into contact with numerous Japanese, Korean, and even some European anarchists. With their Japanese and Korean brethren, Chinese anarchists expanded their networks.[71]
Foreign study programs and overseas Chinese communities played an even greater role in internationally expanding Chinese anarchist correspondence networks. Chinese anarchist students in France during the 1920s had the opportunities to meet with influential European anarchists, such as Emma Goldman (1869–1940) and Alexander Berkman (1870–1936), who lived there at the time. Members of the overseas Chinese communities provided further links, and in some cases connected anarchists in China to not only radical overseas Chinese, but also different ethnic radical groups.[72] Anarchist construction of social space and anarchist participation in communications networks was an intertwined affair, and Chinese anarchists could not practice anarchism without both.
Ba Jin, Lu Jianbo, and Ray Jones’s anarchist careers illustrates this. As mentioned earlier, all three were instrumental in organizing numerous anarchist groups, publishing anarchist journals, and collaborating with overseas colleagues on transnational projects, with Ba Jin and Ray Jones’s collaboration in the *Pingshe* a prominent example.[73] Important to these activities were the spaces in which they operated. Both Ba Jin and Lu Jianbo connected with anarchist colleagues at institutions such as the anarchist-run Huaguang Hospital 华光医院 in Shanghai’s French Concession.[74] They visited friends at anarchist schools such as the National Labor University 国立劳动大学 and Lida Academy 立达学院. Ba Jin even famously described the anarchist activities of the faculty and staff of Liming Advanced Middle School 黎明高中 in the city of Quanzhou in the southeastern coastal province of Fujian.[75] In San Francisco, Ray Jones helped set up a reading room for anarchists to study the likes of Kropotkin, Bakunin, and Malatesta.[76] None of these were ever just Chinese spaces. Korean, Japanese, and even a few European anarchists worked and lived side by side with their Chinese colleagues in Shanghai. French anarchist Jacques Reclus (1894–1984), nephew of Elisée Reclus, taught at the Labor University and even once saved Lu Jianbo from being arrested by GMD agents.[77] Ray Jones and other members of Pingshe regularly attended gatherings held by the International Group, an anarchist society meant to bring together the Bay Area’s multi-ethnic anarchist communities.[78] Beyond these physical spaces, of course, lay the vast global anarchist correspondence networks in which Ba Jin, Lu Jianbo, and Jones all participated. Each actively took part in these networks from the 1920s into the first years of the 1950s, and their correspondence list reads like a who’s who of the international anarchist world: Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Max Nettlau (1865–1944), Thomas Keel (1866–1938), Jean Grave (1854–1939), Rudolf Rocker (1873–1958), Joseph Ishill (1888–1966), and a host of others. Together, these three Chinese anarchist comrades provide a map of the course of anarchist thought, practices, and connections in China and how they thrived, adapted, and survived decades of unrest.
Working to map out the social spaces and networks that Ba Jin, Lu Jianbo, and Ray Jones inhabited will help to move the story of anarchism in China away from a national-scale of analysis, and re-position it as an integral component of the history of anarchists in the world. Critically, it highlights not only just how globally enmeshed revolutionary movements and currents like anarchism could be, but also how connected to the world Chinese actually were. Moving away from an intellectualized narrative of anarchism’s story in China, highlights just how important it is to examine personal, local, and global experiences and how they shaped the lives of Chinese living during the tumultuous decades of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s.
*** Methodologies
Ba Jin, Lu Jianbo, and Ray Jones’s anarchist networks rested on connectivity and space. In terms of connectivity, both the content and the mechanics of correspondence need to be examined. In examining the content that passed through Chinese anarchist networks, this project will utilize what cultural anthropologist David Scott calls a problem-space.[79] Scott defines a problem-space as a conceptual and ideological argumentative context, and “what defines this discursive context are not only the particular problems that get posed...but the particular questions that seem worth asking and the kinds of answers that seem worth having.”[80] Ba Jin, Lu Jianbo, and Ray Jones’s efforts to utilize anarchist to both remedy China’s ills and connect to larger movements for worldwide anarchist revolution answered the needs and desires of the problem-space of their time. The concept of “problem-space” gets at the intellectual community they found themselves in, and to understand the place of anarchism in their correspondence, we must know what kinds of questions they were asking. That is why examining both their correspondence and published writings is essential. In these writings, we can illuminate not only Ba Jin, Lu Jianbo, and Ray Jones’s questions, but how they fit in with the shared questions and vocabularies of their larger intellectual communities. Without those shared concepts, they could not have engaged Chinese and international audiences in discussion and polemics.
The mechanics of these networks involve how letters and materials were sent back and forth and what instructional information they may have contained. They also involve the spatial distribution and movement of individuals and organizations within the network. Throughout this correspondence network, materials such as books and pamphlets were exchanged in addition to letters. Further, in times of disruption due to war or other crises, participants in these networks relied on surrogate routes and individuals who acted as proxies to pass along information. Specifically, individuals in these networks constantly relocated and were never static. The fluidity of these networks requires careful scrutiny. Potential model examinations of anarchist networks exist in Davide Turcato and Andrew Hoyt’s studies of Italian anarchist print distribution. In his research, Turcato presents a case study of revolving editorship and sponsorship of the Paterson, New Jersey-based Italian anarchist journal, *La Questione Sociale*. Turcato finds that the importance of the journal transformed along with changing the changing political circumstances of Italian anarchists around the world. Government oppression in Italy during the 1890s shut down the anarchist press and drove many Italian anarchists into exile. Many of them went to Paterson, where they took over *La Questione Sociale*‘s editorial board, transforming the journal from a local union newspaper into a transnational voice of Italian anarchists that was distributed across the Western Hemisphere. Turcato further outlines that the financial health of *La Questione Sociale* and other journals depended a vast network of Italian anarchists in the Americas and Europe. Often times, these journals’ survival depended on transnational donations.[81] In this way, anarchist papers were transnational ventures simultaneously embedded in global revolutionary networks, transnational migration chains, and local social and political communities.
Taking Turcato’s arguments further, Andrew Hoyt emphasizes the mechanics of anarchist papers, the correspondence sections, subscription and contributions lists, notices, and the artisans and printers who physically put these all together as key to understanding anarchist networks. As such, Hoyt focuses on the distinctions between networks formed by major intellectual/political leaders and networks formed by more rank and file adherents. Using the ideas ‘weak ties’, ‘strong ties’, and ‘bridging nodes’ to examine the case of Luigi Galleani’s *Cronaca Sovversiva*, published in Barre, Vermont from 1903–1920, he argues that ‘weak ties’ formed by rank and file anarchists and anarchist papers were just as important as the personalized transnational ‘strong ties’ provided by globally mobile intellectual elites. In the *Cronaca Sovversiva*’s case, the intellectual work of Luigi Galleani in the editorial content linked the paper to a community of international anarchist polemics. However, the work that local anarchist activists did in spreading the paper throughout local communities and the space the paper provided for anarchists to communicate with each other in the correspondence section allowed the paper and its creators to serve as ‘bridging nodes’ that could potentially bring together anarchists in ways that an influential intellectual leader could not.[82] So too can we view the activities of Chinese anarchists. As avid participants in global communications chains and printers and publishers of journals and newspapers, they possessed ‘strong ties’ to one another, held ‘weak ties’ to broader audiences through connections created by their publications, and served as ‘bridging nodes’ in bringing a variety of communities and individuals together.
The communities and social spaces in which Chinese anarchists such as Ba Jin, Lu Jianbo, and Ray Jones lived and operated will also be mapped. They will be mapped in terms of the physical locations of individual’s homes, their places of work, and the locations at which they gathered and fraternized with colleagues. Important in the mapping of the communities and neighborhoods in which Chinese anarchists lived is an emphasis on the interplay between inscribing social space and fashioning self-identity. Fabio Lanza’s work on the construction of student identities at Peking University 北京大学 during the 1919 Fourth Movement provides an ample template.[83] Lanza contends that May Fourth students did not arrive fully formed with the revolutionary and progressive qualities historians have long ascribed to them. Rather, student identities were crafted through association with their peers and the surrounding physical and social environments. It was through going to bookstores, attending classes in musty buildings on campus, forming study groups in overcrowded dorms, and holding political demonstrations on chaotic streets that May Fourth youth created and embodied the political category of students. Likewise, Ba Jin, Lu Jianbo, and Ray Jones’s anarchist identities came about through similar processes. Following Lanza’s points on Peking University students then, we cannot look at Chinese anarchists not as already formed identities, but as social constructs that are constantly being shaped and reshaped by interactions with wider social and physical worlds.
Lu Jianbo began participating in anarchist groups in 1921 while a student at Southern Sichuan Normal College 南川师范学院 near Chongqing. Arrests and the threat of execution forced him to flee to Nanjing in 1923 and to Beijing in 1924. While in Nanjing, he first formed the Minfengshe and began publishing its namesake journal, *Minfeng* 《民锋》, the *People’s Vanguard*. The group and journal were largely his own work, and when he fled to Beijing in 1924, Lu Jianbo continued to write and edit its articles. However, because he soon came to the attention of authorities for his anti-government activities, he could not easily publish the journal. Instead, he sent his proofs of *Minfeng* back to comrades in Nanjing for publication, and soon after, changed its name to 《黑澜》, or *Black Waves*. After one issue under its new name, the journal folded. In 1926, after he moved to Shanghai, he reformed the Minfengshe and relaunched *Minfeng*. Lu Jianbo considered this new iteration of *Minfeng* and the Minfengshe, its organization and aims, to be different. This new Minfeng was not to be the intellectual project of a single individual but a group connected to the masses. He quickly renamed his group the Zhongguo Shaonian Wuzhengfuzhugongchan Zhuyi Tongmeng 中国少年无政府共产主义同盟, or the Chinese Anarchist Youth Federation and attempted to organize and instruct industrial workers on how to form syndicalist unions. His and the group’s efforts were not to last though. A combination of the GMD’s violent 1927 purge of communists and other leftist elements from its ranks, subsequent political repression and censorship, and poor health forced Lu Jianbo back to Sichuan in 1931. He eventually settled in the Chengdu area and began working as a teacher. However, he never stopped writing and publishing, and from 1937 to 1939, he edited *Jingzhe*, which sought to transform anti-Japanese resistance efforts into anarchist revolution and ally anarchist efforts in China to global anarchist-led anti-fascist movements.[84] From Lu Jianbo’s movements, the composition of his groups, and the content and distribution of his journals, this project may examine not only the scope of his networks, but also the variety of spaces and environments through which he and his activities became codified as anarchist, revealing not just the geographic extent and longevity, but also how the persistence of Lu Jianbo’s anarchist practices remain as a present day resource. Such an analysis, of course, will be extended to the trajectories of Ba Jin and Ray Jones.
*** Sources
This dissertation makes uses of sources from both private letters and anarchist publications that were written across a plethora of languages: Chinese, English, Spanish, French, and Italian. All three individuals, Ba Jin, Ray Jones, and Lu Jianbo were conversant in at least two languages (Chinese and English).[85] Ba Jin and Lu Jianbo possessed reading and, or, writing knowledge of Spanish, French, Italian, and Esperanto.[86] Their multilingualism is reflected in their personal correspondences with international anarchists. Ba Jin’s private correspondence is perhaps the most well documented and anthologized. He wrote primarily in English to his non-Chinese speaking anarchist colleagues, and a majority of the letters he wrote to European and American-based anarchists have been published in the 2003 anthology, *Yijian xinbian*.[87] Originals and transcriptions of these letters are collected in a number of archives across the globe, and wherever possible, the body of dissertation cites these.[88] Ray Jones’s correspondence, including letters from Ba Jin and Lu Jianbo from the 1920s into the 1940s, is housed at the Ethnic Studies Library in Berkeley and is primarily in Chinese. So far, no collection of Lu Jianbo’s correspondence has been found outside those letters in Ray Jones’s papers.[89] However, letters he wrote to Hong Kong-based anarchist Ma Schmu are held by the Chinese University of Hong Kong.[90] Further, there is at least one surviving example of a letter he composed in Spanish among the Confederación Nacional Trabajadores-Federación Anarquista Ibérica (CNT-FAI) papers held by the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam.[91]
Periodicals and their digitization have played an important role in examining the way anarchism connected individuals nationally and internationally. Not only did periodicals serve as nodes through which various anarchist communities connected, but they also reinforced the polyglot nature of transnational anarchist practice. Both Lu Jianbo and Ba Jin, during the 1920s, were prolific writers and publishers of Chinese-language anarchist journals and papers. Many of the Chinese periodicals and articles they produced have been digitally uploaded to the Periodical Database for Republican China at the Shanghai National Library.[92] This holds true for the periodicals in which Ray Jones was involved as well. From 1927 to 1930, Ray Jones and Ba Jin collaborated on the transnational Chinese-language anarchist journal, *Pingdeng* 《平等》, or *Equality*, and many of those issues can also be found digitally uploaded by the Shanghai National Library.[93] Digital archives are crucial too in revealing Chinese anarchists’ international links. Over the past few years, the Bibliothek de Freien, an anarchist collective in Berlin has put together an aggregator of publicly available digital collections of anarchist materials, the “List of Digitized Anarchist Periodicals” (Lidiap).[94] Writings by Ba Jin and Lu Jianbo that appeared in English-, French-, Spanish-, and Italian-language international anarchist publications in the late 1920s and again in the 1940s have been made available thanks to both the Bibliothek and respective collections.[95] Digitized collections like those listed by Lidiap have been crucial in demonstrating how anarchist publications served as a transnational bridge for different anarchist communities. Nonetheless, in teasing out the possibilities made possible by digitized sources, it should not be forgotten that these resources were originally consumed and distributed by physical means and that people were integral in the amassing of now digital collections.[96]
Two important figures have been key in locating physical sources: Yamaguchi Mamoru and Angel Pino. Yamaguchi Mamoru, a Ba Jinologist from Tokyo National University has spent years locating and cataloging existing sources of Ba Jin’s correspondence with international figures. From his research, he has published numerous bibliographic essays detailing collections of Ba Jin related material throughout the world. However, because his research focuses on Ba Jin’s literary output, his analysis of Ba Jin’s anarchism is limited to how it affected his fiction.[97] Nevertheless, Yamaguchi’s work remains a cornerstone in examining the place of Chinese anarchists in national and international dealings. Angel Pino is another literary scholar of Ba Jin. Pino’s work focuses on Ba Jin’s work as a translator of anarchist and other radical texts.[98] He investigates how Ba Jin’s correspondence with international anarchist figure influenced his work as a translator and as a producer of anarchist knowledge. The particularities of scholars like Pino and Yamaguchi point to another pertinent issue the appears throughout the dissertation: who and what is anarchist history for. Anarchism, as a movement has spent much effort in telling its own story on its own terms. This has led to certain gaps and predilections as to how anarchists tell their own story versus how academics, professional scholars, and the political powers that be do so. Exploring this division between activist and academic history is worthwhile in that it exposes fissures and bonds between narratives produced by communities of belief versus those produced by communities of scholarly professionals.[99]
One example of this division can be seen in Ba Jin’s literary texts, histories and fiction, that dealt with anarchism and anarchists. As an influential writer and publisher, Ba Jin was involved with numerous publishing houses and bookstores, such as Freedom Bookstore 自由书店, Enlightened Bookstore 开明书店, Dawn Bookstore 平明书店, and, most importantly, the Culture and Life Publishing House 文化生活出版社. Through these publishing ventures, Ba Jin published numerous works in the 1920s and 1930s that dealt with his friendships with anarchists, particularly those who were working at Liming Advanced Middle School 黎明高中 in Quanzhou, Fujian. Later, teachers and staff at Liming had their own oral testimonies, including reminiscences of Ba Jin, collected in volumes of *wenshi ziliao* 文史资料 (historical materials) published in the1980s. Ba Jin’s writings and these memoirs have been used to shape the narrative of Liming and Quanzhou’s anarchist past, creating what Chapter 4 describes as a celebratory, but clouded Ba Jin Culture.[100] More broadly, this production of memoirs, textual ephemera, and educational tomes, sometimes by Chinese anarchists themselves, lends Chinese anarchists an idealized literary identity that was sometimes at odds with how they acted in the world. Through the tracing of Chinese anarchist correspondence and periodicals, this dissertation hopes to re-center the narrative on Chinese participation in transnational networks and what they did to envision and create worlds beyond nation and state.
*** Traveling through Chinese Anarchist Networks
This dissertation sees its tracing of Chinese in anarchist networks across the globe as traveling through networks. As such, its structure resembles that of a hub with the spokes of anarchist contacts and activities radiating outwards. In this vein, Chapter 2 utilizes Ba Jin’s own correspondence networks and connections to set up the later chapters. Despite the efforts of Zarrow, Dirlik, and Krebs, Ba Jin, for better and for worse, is perhaps the most recognizable Chinese anarchist within current narratives. Thankfully, Ba Jin was a voluminous letter writer and took part in an extensive correspondence network with anarchist figures and organizations across the globe.[101] Within this network of correspondents, he developed a longstanding relationship with both Ray Jones and Lu Jianbo. Ba Jin and Lu Jianbo met in the early 1920s via mutual correspondence, not actually meeting in person until sometime after 1925, when both lived and worked among Shanghai’s anarchist communities.[102] Across the Pacific, Ray Jones proved an invaluable resource for both Ba Jin and Lu Jianbo, procuring books and materials for each as well as serving as key organizer for *Pingdeng*. However, it was not just Ray Jones’s networks that enriched Ba Jin and Lu Jianbo’s. Sometime in 1927, Ba Jin introduced Ray Jones to Emma Goldman, who further offered her contacts to Italian anarchists in San Francisco[103] Ba Jin would later gain access to Bay Area Italian anarchist circles through Jones. Ultimately, all three operated within a shared epistolary milieu that served to organize movements and publications and wove together anarchists across regions and communities. It is this milieu that Chapter 2 will explore.
Employing Andrew Hoyt’s concepts of ‘bridging nodes’, Chapter 2 will establish Ba Jin as both hub and actor, connecting Chinese anarchists and anarchist communities with their transnational counterparts. It will first provide a bird’s eye view of Ba Jin’s 1920s anarchist Shanghai, and from there, the chapter will then explore the various networks in which he participated: Ba Jin’s connection to Ray Jones and late 1920s San Francisco, his relationship with a number of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese anarchists working to develop an anarchist high school and middle school in Quanzhou, Fujian, his presence in Lu Jianbo’s wartime anarchist publication, *Jingzhe* 《惊蛰 》, and then ends with Ba Jin’s attempts to reconstruct his anarchist networks after the war, focusing on the working relationship he developed with the anarchist librarian, Agnes Inglis. The structure of the chapter is designed to resemble a network topology. That is, though chronological in arrangement, the de-centered structure of the chapter is to mimic a map of the communications networks in which Ba Jin participated. As such, it is to give the reader the impression that within each node described, there exist different layers of networked correspondence and connection.[104] The chapters that follow will represent an expansion of the nodes covered in Chapter 2 and will refocus these networks away from Ba Jin, giving an expanded view into the breadth of Chinese anarchist activity.
Beginning with Chapter 3, the moves away from Ba Jin’s hub to trace the networks developed by Ray Jones, Lu Jianbo and others. Chapter 3, which describes the networks wrought by Ray Jones and his group of Chinese anarchists in 1920s San Francisco, is centered on the transnational stories contained in *Pingdeng* and Jones’s later anarchist journal, *Wuzhengfugongchan yuekan* 《无政府共产月刊》. The chapter locates their activities not only in trans-Pacific networks that facilitated both the migration of Chinese laborers and radical ideologies, but also within a multiethnic environment that facilitated cross-ethnic alliances and political projects.[105] Both journals simultaneously pointed to China’s revolutionary situation, radical waves in Europe, and, importantly, as demonstrated by Jane Mee Wong’s writing, the local actions in which the Pingshe participated.[106] The presence of Jones and the Pingshe in San Francisco’s anarchist scene were further documented by the oral testimonies of numerous Italian anarchists who were closely allied with the publication *Man!* and the International Group, a transnational group of anarchists that operated in the Bay Area in the 1920s and 30s. Jones and his Chinese comrades would occasionally appear in *Man!*, adding another layer to the connections between Jones, his group of Chinese anarchists, and the surrounding anarchist communities. Jones and the Pingshe’s trans-Pacific connections and their embeddedness in a multi-ethnic radical milieu reflected possibilities of how anarchist communities could engage in actions that transcended state and nation. Significantly, Jones’s story also represents a grassroots sensibility in that the semi-educated Jones operated as equals with intellectual elites. Yet, it was Jones and his companions laboring among San Francisco’s transnational Chinese community that proved their staying power and not their connections to Ba Jin and Chinese anarchist intellectuals.
Following the spokes laid out in Chapter 2, Chapter 4 probes the efforts of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean anarchists to set up and run an anarchist school in Quanzhou, Fujian. In existence from 1929 to 1934, the two schools, Liming Advanced Middle School and Pingmin Middle School 平民中学 shared educational policies with the anarchist Labor University and Lida Academy in Shanghai. Further, they shared many of the same faculty and administrators, all of whom were close comrades of Ba Jin.[107] The nature of the sources on the Fujian schools makes this chapter a special case. Liming and Pingmin’s stories have come down through Ba Jin’s literary writings and through memoirs collected in various *wenshi ziliao* published in the 1980s, and these sources have been deployed to construct an identity of Quanzhou and Liming as a center of Ba Jin Culture. This narrative has been under construction since Liming was first reestablished in the early 1980s, culminating in the establishment of a Ba Jin Research Center and in the 2010s, a city-wide Ba Jin Culture Festival. Chapter 4 attempts to recover Liming and Pingmin’s anarchist pasts by wading through the Ba Jin and teasing out the anarchist threads present in the *wenshi ziliao*. In so doing, it recovers the schools’ anarchist pasts, their deep connections to Quanzhou’s longstanding overseas networks, and extensive regional affiliations and collaborations among Chinese, Japanese, and Korean anarchists.[108] Moreover, it posits a new protagonist to Quanzhou’s anarchist past, Liang Piyun 梁披云 (1907–2010), Liming’s original headmaster and an influential educator who ideas have influenced overseas Chinese education and are currently cited as integral to the maritime One Belt One Road.[109]
Chapter 5 takes up anarchist contributions to the early days of the Anti-Japanese War, delving into the workings of *Jingzhe* 《惊蛰》, an anarchist periodical published in Chengdu by Lu Jianbo and his allies from 1937 to 1940. Placing Lu Jianbo and *Jingzhe* in the context of leftwing interwar internationalist and transnational anti-fascist movements, Chapter 5 explores the deep connections he made with Spanish anarchists in North America and Europe and how those anarchists and their role in Spain’s Civil War shaped the content and editorial direction of *Jingzhe*.[110] From there, the chapter will take apart *Jingzhe* as a material object so as to get into the print culture behind how the journal was put together. *Jingzhe* followed earlier anarchist publications in being continuously low on operating funds, but it also had to deal with increasing paper and print shortages due to the outbreak of the war. These circumstances notably changed not only *Jingzhe*’s format, but also its content. It went from being a journal that relayed news about the anarchists in Spain and how the war effort against the Japanese could learn from Spanish examples to a journal that explicitly advocated an anarchist revolutionary front that would first defeat the Japanese and then finish the revolution against the GMD and CCP. This forgotten anarchist voice during the war reminds us as to the vitality and commitments of Chinese anarchists and the global connections they developed in support of their agendas. Though *Jingzhe* ceased publication in 1940, its existence and how it was put together serves as a microcosm of the multiplicity of parties and agendas during the war and of how groups like the anarchists both reflected and sought to emphasize the conflict’s transnational nature.
The final chapter, Chapter 6 picks up the story after the end of the Second World War with Chinese anarchist looking to reconstruct their networks. Taking cues from Leela Gandhi’s concept of radical affinity, this chapter aims to piece together how Ba Jin, Lu Jianbo, and others were able to re-form their anarchist networks after the Second World War.[111] Beginning from Lu’s attempts to solicit materials and funds to rebuild the anarchist organizations in which he participated, this chapter will analyze how Lu and other Chinese anarchists turned again to their international colleagues in camaraderie and for guidance. From Lu’s efforts, the chapter will then dive into Ba Jin’s equally extensive but altogether different efforts to rebuild anarchist networks, particularly his correspondence with Agnes Inglis, which created an unofficial archive of Chinese anarchist writings at the University of Michigan. Ba Jin and Inglis’s correspondence revealed overlapping networks, and from this overlap emerged the figure of Darren Kuang Chen 匡达人 (n.d.), a daughter of the influential anarchist educator, Kuang Husheng 匡互生 (1891–1933), founder of Lida Academy and a close friend of Ba Jin’s.[112] From Darren’s appearance, the chapter will move to develop the very tangled and dense networks in which Lu, Ba Jin, and other Chinese anarchists participated. It will do so by taking up Darren’s relationships with Inglis and a community of veteran anarchist activists in Chicago and New York and how her relationships with these expose the existence of another, unheard of anarchist, Liu Chuang. Through the experiences of Darren and Liu Chuang, Chapter 6 will end with demonstrating how these overlapping networks converged, providing a map of just how enmeshed Chinese anarchist were within international anarchist circles.
A short concluding chapter will end things by reflecting on how the afterlives of Chinese anarchists and their transnational practices offer possibilities of how Chinese participation in anarchist global networks, their longevity, and the voices of the anarchists themselves emphasizes that a) not everything in China’s revolutions revolved around the GMD, CCP, or the nation-state; and b) even as overshadowed as anarchism became, it still offered something significant enough for individuals and groups to persevere in its practice.
*** Seeing Chinese in the World through Anarchist practice
For the past century, Chinese anarchists have continually popped up from the revolutionary woodwork to promote and practice radical visions of national and transnational transformation. They have always been simultaneously national and international in outlook, but save the briefest of moments in the 1920s, have always been marginalized within Chinese and global revolutionary processes. This lack of presence, especially in the Chinese contexts of political oppression and the ascendance of the GMD and CCP, has necessarily meant that it was only through travel, migration, letter-writing, publication, and network building that anarchists could continue to exist and operate. The lack of a centralized organization or party required anarchists to look to people, paper, and publications as the medium for action. In some sense, this restricted the activities of anarchists to local circles and individuals already in-network, but it also allowed anarchists to continue to quietly do their work and advance their vision of social and political revolution in a variety of environments. In this way Chinese anarchists operated trans-Pacific publishing ventures, founded schools in Quanzhou, ran publications in Chengdu during the early days of the Anti-Japanese War, and rebuilt and re-forged international networks and personal ties in the aftermath of the Second World War. Further, as later seen in the 70s Front in Hong Kong, as well as in groups like the Chuang 闯 and Lausan 流伞 Collectives, Chinese anarchist and anarchist-inspired groups continue to appear.[113]
This dissertation, in focusing on the activities figures like Ba Jin, Ray Jones, Liang Piyun, and Lu Jianbo will not budge the behemoths that are the GMD, the CCP, and the current narrative of China’s revolution. But it might nudge us into looking at China’s and Chinese global imaginations and experiences and not just focusing on China and Chinese as a nation and nationals. As much as China’s problems occupied the attentions of Chinese individuals, they were not limited to worrying about China, nor should we expect them to think only of China, nor should we expect them to have the same vision or think of themselves only as Chinese. Further, in exploring Chinese in anarchist networks, the dissertation aims to view anarchist history as a prosopography of a large cast of agents and their actions, and not as the provenance of a lone or few paramount individuals. The story of Chinese anarchist and anarchist-associated figures and their efforts to establish communities of thought and action that crisscrossed and transcended national borders is one of overlapping networks that shifted, expanded, and contracted depending on who was at the center.
In Ba Jin’s anarchist efforts in the mid-1920s, we see how Chinese anarchists served as a hub of multiple networks that varied in breadth and intent. With Ray Jones and his San Francisco group, Pingshe, we see how radicalized members of the overseas community both looked to the corridors that connected them to political currents in China, but also served as their own corridor to bridge radical groups spanning the Pacific from the late 1920s into the 1930s and beyond. The Fujian anarchists demonstrate the ways in which Chinese anarchists found means to survive in the fractious politics of the early 1930s by drawing on overlapping loyalties and interests within the GMD and longstanding Nanyang communities. In the late 1930s, Lu Jianbo utilized Spanish contacts to bring together Chinese and Spanish anarchist revolutionary ideas and link the Anti-Japanese War and the Spanish Civil War in a global anti-fascist front. After the Second World War, we not only witness Ba Jin, Lu Jianbo, Jones and others attempt to reestablish their existing networks, but we also observe how younger Chinese anarchists begin to build their own.
In examining these histories, this dissertation argues that the importance of Chinese anarchists lies in how their networks and actions paint a picture of Chinese life that was not bounded by the national or political revolution, or even the concerns of everyday modern life. The stories that the lives and experiences of Chinese in transnational anarchist networks tell is that of cosmopolitan individuals acting to transform and create new worlds despite the best efforts of political leaders, historians, and social scientists to shove them back into the confines of the nation or the ideology of a party.
** Chapter 2 – Spokes of the Wheel: Ba Jin as Hub within Global Anarchist Worlds
*** Introduction
Ba Jin 巴金 is perhaps the most well-known Chinese anarchist, but he was far from the only anarchist in China. Perhaps it is better to think of Ba Jin as a ‘bridging node’ within a larger network of anarchists and anarchist activities in China, Asia, Europe, and North America. As discussed in the introduction, anarchism, as a movement, did not center on institutions and institutional bodies. There was no anarchist international in the same vein as the Communist International (Comintern).[114] Rather, anarchism was centered on individuals, their activities, and the networks in which they participated.[115] Though these anarchist networks were in constant flux due to the movements of individuals, they nonetheless coalesced around centers, peoples, presses, and geographic locations.[116] It is in this sense that we explore Ba Jin as an anarchist and as a bridging node within anarchist networks. Ba Jin served as a node through his correspondence and publishing activities, which were mostly based in Shanghai from the mid-1920s through the 1940s, and also includes his brief stay in France in 1927–1928. In examining Ba Jin’s place as a node for Chinese anarchist activity, this chapter will aim to reveal not just the lesser known Chinese anarchist figures that were just as, if not probably more influential than Ba Jin was at the time, but also the geographic extent of Chinese anarchist activity.[117] In efforts to connect Chinese anarchist practice to global movements, Ba Jin and other Chinese anarchists not only involved themselves in numerous networks with international anarchist figures in Europe and the Americas, they also worked closely with their Asian comrades-in-arms in Korea, Japan, and the Nanyang.
At this point, it is worth emphasizing that anarchism and anarchists in China cannot just be discussed in terms of China’s national problems, their transnational existence demands they be considered simultaneously with both broader Asian anarchist circles and Euro-American movements.[118] In this context, Ba Jin’s status as an anarchist ‘bridging node’ and the correspondence networks that circled around his figure will not only reveal the extent to which he, himself, was involved with anarchists across the globe, they can also serve as a tool, a lens, through which we can see the activities of other lesser known anarchists in China and how these anarchists themselves were enmeshed in their own individual and shared international anarchist networks.[119]
To position Ba Jin as a node through which we can view the activities and undertakings of anarchists in China, this chapter will trace, from Ba Jin’s perspective, how his networks of correspondence and his anarchist practices developed.[120] First, we will look at Ba Jin’s initial foray into anarchist circles in Chengdu in the early 1920s, and from there, we will follow him to Nanjing, Shanghai, and France, where he began to construct a wide ranging web of international contacts, including Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Thomas Keel, Max Nettlau, and others.[121] From these contacts we can clearly discern Ba Jin and other Chinese anarchists’ problems and issues being projected onto a global stage. Moreover, we can also see how Ba Jin and other Chinese anarchists, both within China and abroad, were building connections between their own movement and actions with those of groups in London and Paris. It is these correspondences that reveal the roles Ba Jin’s Chinese comrades, such as Bao Pu 抱朴 (n.d.), Wei Huilin 卫慧林 (1904–1992), Wu Kegang 吴克刚(1903–1999), and others played in Chinese anarchist circles.[122]
From his time in France, we then move across the Pacific to San Francisco and Ba Jin’s work with Ray Jones, aka Liu Zhongshi in editing and putting together the trans-Pacific Chinese anarchist journal, *Pingdeng*.[123] *Pingdeng* was edited in France and later Shanghai by Ba Jin and his cohort, Wu Kegang, Wei Huilin and others, and distributed in China, Europe, and North America. The periodical was the official journal of Jones’s Pingshe. The Pingshe group was a Bay Area Chinese anarchist group that organized and held lectures for Chinese workers in the Bay Area. It was in contention with GMD organizations and cooperated with other multiethnic San Francisco-based anarchist groups. The journal reflected this transnational audience by incorporating news and analysis from San Francisco, China, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Europe, as well as introducing news from other international anarchist groups.
*Pingdeng* officially ended in 1930, but Ba Jin’s international connections carried on. In the early 1930s, Ba Jin visited and corresponded with a group of international comrades who operated the Liming Advanced Middle School and Pingmin Middle School in Quanzhou, Fujian.[124] Further, during this decade, he became involved translating and reporting on events in Spain for the lead up to and duration of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). The majority of these were published independently, but some of these translations ended up in the journal *Jingzhe*, which was run by his anarchist comrade, Lu Jianbo, during the first few years of the Anti-Japanese Resistance War.[125] From the war, we then move to trace Ba Jin’s attempts to reestablish his anarchist linkages in the late 40s. After the war, he turned to the international anarchist community in Europe and North America and re-established his links with Ray Jones and found a research companion in Agnes Inglis (1870–1952), curator of the Joseph Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan.[126] These three decades of correspondence and network building ebbed and flowed depending on the political situation, and in many cases the connections were uneven. But, in these efforts, Ba Jin’s world of correspondence reveals not just the ways in which he thought about and practiced anarchism, but also the means by which anarchism was translated into real life by his slew of colleagues.[127]
As outlined above, Ba Jin’s main importance as a Chinese anarchist lies not just in his own actions, but in how he served as a node through which we can see the activities of Chinese anarchists and their transnational connections and presence. Through these connections we can see the depth at which Chinese anarchists operated in Chinese society and more importantly, we can see the global extent and longevity of their activities. Further, these links give a window in to the human lives and activities of anarchists in China.[128] Most importantly, given the obscurity and brevity in which anarchists in China find their position written into mainstream historical narratives, Ba Jin’s networks reveal the very real traces anarchist practice has left on institutions and practices in modern China. These anarchist networks underscore not only the ideological and pragmatic diversity through which Chinese actors sought to address their concerns, but also the existence and capability of Chinese to see beyond elite concerns of state-building and to imagine local and global communities outside the construct of the nation-state.
*** Networks and Nodes – Ba Jin’s Anarchist Journeys from Chengdu to France and Shanghai
Ba Jin first became acquainted with anarchism in 1919 at the age of fifteen. One of the first anarchist writings he read was a Chinese translation of Kropotkin’s 1880 pamphlet, *Appeal to the Young*.[129] *Appeal to the Young* was a call to all disaffected educated youth with a core message of how to lead a life that contributed to social betterment and welfare.[130] Ba Jin described this initial encounter with Kropotkin as life changing. In a later reminiscence he wrote, “I never thought that there was such a book in the world! Inside were all the things I desired to say but had no way of expressing clearly. Those [words] were so clear, so equitable, so eloquent. Moreover, that incendiary style set ablaze a fifteen-year old’s heart.”[131] The fervor of Kropotkin’s tone infatuated him: “The contents of this book burn with Kropotkin’s revolutionary fervor. All that which his spirit felt, all that which was engraved in his soul, has in this book found an exceedingly deep expression.”[132] Ba Jin described the work as Kropotkin’s ode to the European proletariat and the then pregnant air of revolutionary hopefulness, which Kropotkin sought to communicate through his inflammatory writings.[133] This ode would inspire Ba Jin to join with comrades across China and the world who took up the anarchist cause.[134]
Ba Jin soon began participating in and contributing to anarchist and other radical-leaning journals that were published in and around his hometown of Chengdu. His first known anarchist tracts appeared in 1921, in the pages of *Banyue* 《半月》 (*Half Moon*), a journal which began as a radical May Fourth-inspired journal, but soon became an anarchist mouthpiece. Written under the penname, Feigan 芾甘, Ba Jin’s article, “How to Build a Truly Free and Equal Society” attacks government and the capitalist class as the source of all oppression and spurs the working classes to revolution. It covered themes that would persist throughout his careers as an anarchist activist and novelist, and most importantly, would pervade his correspondence with fellow anarchists.[135] While participating in *Banyue*, Ba Jin also formed the *Rensheng she* 人声社 (Voice Society), editing and contributing to the group’s journal *Rensheng zazhi* 《人声杂志》 (*Voice Magazine*). In the May 1, 1921 edition, Ba Jin and his colleagues produced a special retrospective on International Labor Day that covered labor movements across China and Hong Kong, and included in depth coverage of labor unions in England, Italy, and Hungary.[136] In these journals and the articles Ba Jin contributed to them, he devoted significant space to exploring the histories of the IWW and radical labor unions, anarchist martyrs, revolutionary heroines, and the fervency of his faith in anarchist ideals, all of which were topics that would continue to pepper his later writings and endeavors.[137]
In 1923, Ba Jin left Sichuan and went to study in Nanjing. There, he would further expand his anarchist activities. Some of his first known translations of anarchist writings appeared in 1925, and it was also in the same year he penned criticisms of the Soviet Union, Marxist-Leninist Thought, and the Bolsheviks. These critiques and translations were collected in Beijing’s *Xuehui* 《学汇》 (*Sea of Learning*).[138] *Xuehui* was a national and transnational Chinese anarchist journal printed in Beijing. Through his contributions to this particular journal, Ba Jin’s translations and polemics would have reached a larger audience than what his Chengdubased journals would have had. Further, as Ba Jin would have had access to the physical copies of the journal, he would have been able to communicate with anarchists all over the Chinesespeaking world via *Xuehui*’s message board, the *xiao tongxin* 小通信.[139] All the while, during his time in Nanjing, Ba Jin attended school and waffled over possibly taking exams and positions in Beijing arranged for him by his elder brother.[140] In the end though, Ba Jin decided against pursuing studies and career in Beijing and sometime in 1925, he wound up in Shanghai to further his calling as an anarchist.
Shanghai in the 1920s was a hotbed of anarchist activities and Ba Jin would have found himself surrounded by like-minded colleagues and active anarchist social spaces. One of the more important anarchist spaces in the city would have been Deng Mengxian’s 邓梦仙 Huaguang Hospital 华光医院 in the French Concession.[141] Deng’s hospital was a vital meeting ground for the city’s anarchists. Various anarchist groups held social gatherings at the hospital and it served as lodging for anarchists moving into Shanghai from other provinces.[142] Other locations included Kuang Husheng’s 匡互生 Lida Academy 立达学院, which served both as an institution of progressive education and as site for anarchist educators to join physical labor and education.[143] The French concession also served as the site for Kaiming 开明书店 and Ziyou 自由书店 book shops, both influential anarchist bookstores and publishers, and the latter of which was operated by Ba Jin and his circle.[144] The prevalence of anarchists and anarchist spaces in Shanghai connected Ba Jin to resources that expanded his range of anarchist activities and enabled his ability to serve as a node.
While in Shanghai, Ba Jin engaged in further polemics, writing a variety of articles that critiqued Marxism, outlined anarchist histories, and expounded upon anarchist theory and practice.[145] He engaged other anarchist thinkers in debates and kept building his range of contacts. At the beginning of 1927, Ba Jin sailed to France to engage in work-study. The anarchist founded work-study movement in France was critical to numerous radical Chinese, both anarchist and communist.[146] While in France, Ba Jin’s connection to international anarchists proliferated as he quickly established contact with influential figures like Alexander Berkman, Max Nettlau, Rudolf Rocker, and others. On some occasions, he even had the chance to meet these famous comrades.[147] In his later writings on his time in France, we find that numerous members of the Chinese anarchist community in France had even deeper connections with the European anarchist circles. Ba Jin’s close friend, Wu Kegang, was one such figure. Wu Kegang associated with Alexander Berkman, Jean Grave, and even had an ill-fated romance with a Polish anarchist-exile in Paris. However, shortly after Ba Jin arrived in France, Wu was issued deportation orders for his working with Nestor Makhno, the Ukrainian anarchist militant who fought against the Red Army in the early 1920s. Wu, Makhno, and other anarchists had worked on what became known as the Arshinov Platform, a plan that outlined potential anarchist organizations to foment revolution and fight against Bolshevik parties.[148] While in France, Ba Jin, Wei Huilin, and Wu Kegang would co-author a series of essays that explored the possibilities of organization and practice and present it to anarchist communities in China, which were already engaged in their own fierce debates as to how to further anarchist movements there.[149]
Perhaps the key node for Ba Jin while in France is the figure of anarchist theorist, educator, and orator, Emma Goldman (1869–1940). Emma Goldman played an integral role in inspiring Ba Jin to take up anarchism. As mentioned previously, Ba Jin nominally took up his pen as an anarchist polemicist around 1921, writing brash and idealistic calls revolutionary action for Chengdu’s *Banyue*.[150] He credits his development of anarchist partisanship in part to his reading a translation of one of Emma Goldman’s articles in 1919, when he was fifteen years old. He described the effect as being “utterly conquered, no, I should say that my muddied eyes were washed clean.”[151] But Goldman’s effect went beyond opening new vistas, it was a matter of “finally finding an explicit faith.”[152] Sometime later, he famously described Goldman as his “spiritual mother” and guiding light in the pronouncement of his belief in anarchism.[153] But Goldman offered something more than spiritual direction through writing that outlined and codified anarchist worldviews and practices. She, as an individual who actively wrote and communicated with a wide variety of individuals, offered an approachable, real-life mentor to Ba Jin, the budding and recently turned anarchist.
Ba Jin corresponded with Emma Goldman from as early as 1921 into the late 1920s, and possibly into the 1930s.[154] Surviving letters between the two come from Ba Jin’s time as a student in Nanjing in 1925, while the bulk of the surviving correspondence comes from his time France in 1927–28.[155] In the letters he wrote from France, he looks to Goldman for advice on how to deal with China’s revolutionary condition as an anarchist, how to understand the actions of Wu Zhihui 吴稚晖 (1865–1953), Li Shizeng 李石曾 (1881–1973), and other self-proclaimed anarchists in the Guomindang (GMD), and how to comprehend the apparent violence of Chinese communists. To these queries, Goldman responds that anarchists, though they should be wary of the GMD’s nationalist malfeasance and the lure of government, “it is impossible and utterly inconsistent on the part of the anarchists to keep away from such a popular movement as the Chinese awakening.”[156] Further, she retorts that communists everywhere are equally violent, comparing the violence of communism to the fanaticism to early Christians.[157] Goldman’s answers certainly helped to focus Ba Jin’s anarchist commitment, but he also sought something more of her.[158] Throughout their correspondence of 1927–28, Ba Jin and Goldman discussed the possibility of her going to China to lecture in Shanghai. Certainly, she noted that Jacques Reclus (1894–1984), a French anarchist and grandnephew to the anarchist geographer Elisée Reclus (1830–1905), had gone to teach in China.[159] She felt going to lecture Chinese students on anarchism and other radical topics, quite possibly at Shanghai’s GMD-anarchist run National Labor University, would certainly be inspirational.[160] Ba Jin and Goldman’s discussion over the possibility of her coming to China for a lecture tour was not just an earnest discussion between the two; it was a discussion that also played out in the pages of Chinese anarchist journal, *Minzhong* 《民钟》(*The People’s Tocsin*) .
*Minzhong* was originally a Guangzhou-based anarchist journal, founded in 1922 by Bao Pu, Liu Shixin 刘石心, Liang Bingxian 梁冰弦, and others.[161] It was one of the most important anarchist journals in China and the longest lived, lasting from 1922 to 1927. From its base in Guangzhou, it published on a wide variety of topics pertinent to anarchism in China and anarchism across the world. In 1925, it ran a series of articles and translations on Russian anarchist-exiles in France along with a series of critiques by Bao Pu on the Bolsheviks and Soviet Union.[162] It also carried a number of articles and letters from Chinese anarchists in France.[163] In 1927, the group behind *Minzhong* moved to Shanghai. It is here that Ba Jin becomes more prominent as a contributor, and it is here where his correspondence with Emma Goldman takes up an issue first raised in the journal.
In 1925, *Minzhong* first published a letter from Emma Goldman in which she stated she wished to come to China. In the postscript, it was discussed whether they could arrange a lecture tour for her in China.[164] Later, in 1927, Ba Jin and Goldman went over in detail the issues surrounding any potential trip to China, discussing how to best arrange this and Goldman’s other demands, including that the Chinese side be the ones to fundraise for the costs.[165] After its initial appearance in 1925, the matter was dropped in the journal, but given what is hinted in Ba Jin and Goldman’s letters, it could have been possible that Ba Jin and his colleagues at *Minzhong* were seriously deliberating on the possibilities in 1927. Unfortunately, *Minzhong* ceased publication later that year without having publicly broached any possible invite for Goldman. Yet, Ba Jin and Goldman continued their communications on into 1928, and as late as April of that year, he and Goldman were still discussing the logistics of the matter. Writing that she was glad to hear Ba Jin’s report on Jacques Reclus’s good spirits in teaching at the Labor University in Shanghai, she was somewhat worried about how her potential lectures will be conveyed to Chinese audiences. She ended her letter making sure to let Ba Jin know that she would prefer a method of translation and interpretation that will not distract from the spirit or atmosphere of any speech she might give.[166]
Ba Jin’s experiences in Shanghai and France represent, for our purposes, his transformation into a node of Chinese anarchist communications and activities. Ba Jin began this journey by participating in anarchist networks in Chengdu, and later, in Nanjing. His arrival in Shanghai in 1925 facilitated his integration into that city’s large and diverse anarchist networks, and his time in France enabled his contacts with a larger international audience. By the time he returned to Shanghai in 1928, Ba Jin had become a major figure in Chinese anarchist circles. The connections he developed allowed him to partake in a broad range of international anarchist activities, including taking up the trans-Pacific task of editing, publishing, and distributing of the San Francisco-based Chinese anarchist journal, *Pingdeng*.
*** Ray Jones and San Francisco – A Transpacific Chinese Anarchist Undertaking
At the same time Ba Jin had become a node within Chinese anarchist networks, and at the same time he and his Chinese anarchist comrades were building connections with EuroAmerican anarchists, they were also connecting to Chinese anarchist communities across the Pacific. One of the more significant connections made was Ba Jin’s working relationship with the San Francisco-based Chinese anarchist group, Pingshe. The Pingshe group was led by Ray Jones (Liu Zhongshi 刘钟时), a Guangdong-born anarchist who had come to the United States as a laborer in 1909, working a number of jobs, from the railroads to farms.[167] He became involved in labor activism, and sometime around 1918 joined the Chinese-organized Worker’s League of San Francisco, also known as the Unionist Guild. In 1925, he and other Chinese radicals formed Pingshe. [168] Jones and the Pingshe group were certainly not the first transnational Chinese labor or radical organization. Already in the United States, the Pacific, and the Caribbean, there were numerous Chinese labor and radical organizations with ties overseas ties to the GMD, the CCP, and other political and even native-place associations.[169] Further, the Pingshe group were not the only Chinese anarchists in the United States, nor were they the first or only anarchist-influenced Chinese organization either.[170] More to the point, Pingshe’s existence is situated in a broad history of transnational Chinese political and social activities.[171] In Ba Jin’s relationship with Jones and Pingshe, moreover, we can see a triangulation of anarchist communities and we can see another node. In the pages of the group’s official journal, *Pingdeng*, we see the happenings of Chinese anarchist groups in China. We see too the happenings of Chinese groups in the Nanyang, as well as anarchist groups in Europe, and anarchist groups in the United States. These broad communities were all represented in the pages of a journal that was based and distributed in the United States and edited, compiled, and printed in Shanghai.[172]
The relationship between Ba Jin, Ray Jones and their cooperation in the maintenance of *Pingdeng* can be seen in a series of letters that Ba Jin wrote to Jones in 1929 and 1930. Currently, we only have the letters Ba Jin sent to Jones, but they tell us much about the state of the editing process, finances, printing, and publication.[173] One of the more pressing problems faced by the Pingshe group was the printing and distribution of the journal. The bulk of the conversations between Ba Jin and Jones during this period had to do with this. Very early in the existing correspondence, Ba Jin outlines the difficulties he is having in finding suitable type so as to set up their own printing operations.[174] In his discussion with Jones, he seeks to find a solution to this problem so that they would not have to continue to use an outside printer. The printer they had been using was slammed with other orders, plus their distribution sites were raided by the GMD, which presented difficulties in distributing *Pingdeng*.[175] These difficulties only further pushed Ba Jin and Jones to buy their own press and own type. Over the course of the conversation, they discussed whether it would be cheaper to buy moveable type or a lithograph printer. After asking around various print shops, Ba Jin decided it was best to buy a lithograph printer as it would be cheaper than buying moveable type.[176] He then directed Jones as to how this would transpire, but there were further complications exacerbating matters. Around the same time Ba Jin and Jones decided on a course of action as their distributors in Shanghai were proving to be unreliable. Without a reliable distributor, Ba Jin had no choice but to ask Jones and the San Francisco group to take over printing and distribution.[177] This itself was a monumental task for Jones’s group, as earlier, in 1928, Jones’s apartment was raided and he and another member of the San Francisco group were arrested by the police. They lost almost the entirety of their library, most of which had been produced in concert with Ba Jin and colleagues in Shanghai.[178] However, in light of the stifling political climate under the GMD, Ba Jin had been considering that the Pingshe plan to set up operations in overseas locations that was not as encumbered by the GMD. In this way, Ba Jin wrote, they could grow their organization and grow an anarchist movement.[179] However, soon after, they discussed change printing locations for *Pingdeng*, the journal ceased publication.
Yet, *Pingdeng*’s ending was not entirely caused by GMD censorship and raids. Ba Jin and his Shanghai comrades were incredibly busy organizing other anarchist journals and publications in China. In the letters we have Ba Jin’s recounts his efforts to translate the works of Kropotkin and other European and American anarchists.[180] These efforts took place concurrently with the publication of *Pingdeng*. Moreover, Ba Jin, himself, contributed numerous articles to *Pingdeng* under a variety of pen names, including Heilang 黑浪, Renping 壬平, Feigan 芾甘, Chunfeng 春风, Peigan 佩竿, Jile 极乐, Wuxi 呜希, Yiwu 亦呜, Ganning 甘宁, and Lileng 李冷.[181] The articles Ba Jin published in the journal covered a wide variety of territory, ranging from news reporting to anarchist theory. Similar to Ba Jin’s preoccupation with his own affairs, the other members of the Shanghai cohort responsible for *Pingdeng*’s publication were occupied as well. The late 1920s were the final heyday of anarchist activity in China, and they were also one of its most dangerous periods, with the GMD’s perpetrating mass anti-left political violence. Wei Huilin and Wu Kegang, who helped Ba Jin with this work, were themselves constantly coming and going as they moved back and forth between different anarchist organizations and working groups.[182] In the end, it seemed that the closure of *Pingdeng* was a matter of both political repression by the GMD and the instability and multiple activities of the anarchists in Shanghai.
This is not to say that the three years of the journal’s existence were inconsequential. In Ba Jin and Jones’s correspondence, we see fairly large volumes of printed material sent from Shanghai to San Francisco for distribution. On June 26, 1929, Ba Jin notes that 800 pamphlets and 200 books were sent to San Francisco.[183] In an earlier letter, Ba Jin lets Jones know that he keeps “over a hundred copies [of *Pingdeng*] here [at Ziyou Bookstore] as there’s often people inside the country who ask for them.”[184] Though this may seem small compared to the circulation numbers of other anarchist journals, let alone to the circulation of official GMD or CCP journals, we must not forget the informality of Ba Jin and Jones’s organizations. [185] Jones and Ba Jin kept *Pingdeng* afloat for three years without backing of an international anarchist organization, all the while producing a journal that was free. The same can also be said of the numerous anarchist journals that published in the 1920s. Further, many of these journals were truly international and transnational undertakings with overseas anarchist colleagues submitting editorials and articles and providing translated materials from abroad[186] Moreover, in the case of *Pingdeng*, as will be discussed in the next chapter, these international and transnational connections went beyond the broader Sinophone world.
During their 1927–28 correspondence, Ba Jin introduced Emma Goldman to his friend and collaborator, Ray Jones 刘钟时 (1892–1979), a Chinese anarchist activist and organizer living in San Francisco. Soon, Goldman started corresponding with Jones on her own and directed him to some of her anarchist colleagues who lived in the Bay Area.[187] As we will see, Jones utilized these connections in expanding the possibilities for Chinese anarchist activities in the Bay Area.[188] Further, Jones’s connections to other international anarchist groups would prove useful to Ba Jin. Jones was essential in introducing and facilitating Ba Jin’s links to other immigrant anarchist communities in the United States as Jones and other members of the San Francisco Pingshe lived and worked alongside anarchists and radicals from all over the world. Pingshe, and Jones especially, were particularly close to the Emancipazione Group, an Italian anarchist collective that sought to bring together the various anarchist associations in the Bay Area.[189] Available evidence points to Jones continuing this relationship into the 1940s and possibly even later. Sometime, either in the 1930s or 40s, Jones began using his connections to Bay Area Italian anarchists to act as a middleman for Ba Jin. Writing in 1948, Ba Jin asks about packages of materials Jones had arranged for a group of Spanish anarchists in Fresno and a group of Italian anarchists in Berkeley to send. Further, Ba Jin asks Jones to help him refund money that the Italian Adunata group had sent through friends in Chicago.[190] This and other requests Ba Jin made of Jones demonstrates Jones’s place in Ba Jin’s anarchist networks. Jones, in many ways, served as a fixer for Ba Jin. He arranged for letters, parcels, and contacts. He communicated to Ba Jin the circumstances of anarchist movements in the United States. Certainly, when Jones’s own relationship to Agnes Inglis and the Labadie Collection is examined, these implications are heightened. Ba Jin’s May 1948 shipment of books to the Labadie Collection was not the first time Inglis had dealings with Chinese anarchists. Ray Jones first wrote to Inglis in 1934 to arrangement a shipment of materials from the *Pingshe*, and sometime again in 1936.[191] After resuming contact in 1949, Jones reveals to Inglis that he had even sent a bundle of books and pamphlets to the university library in 1930.[192] The depth and entanglement of this connection as shown by Jones’s dealings, leads to speculation as to how Ba Jin heard about Inglis and the Labadie Collection. One plausible assumption lies in Ray Jones and his contacts within the American anarchist scene. Another possibility lies in Ba Jin’s connection to Emma Goldman, who made use of the Collection as she was corresponding with Ba Jin in 1927–28. While there has been no evidence found in existing or known repositories, what is known about Ba Jin’s connections to international anarchist networks presents possibilities for speculation. Further, this emphasizes that while international anarchist networks were broad, they could be quite ephemeral.
As we see in the case of Ba Jin and Ray Jones’s work with Pingshe and *Pingdeng*, the ephemerality of these networks come from multiple reasons. In Davide Turcato’s discussion of anarchist transnational networks, the ephemerality of anarchist networks does not mean their absence. Networks simply realigned or moved with the main participants.[193] In Ba Jin and Jones’s case, though *Pingdeng* ended, the networks shifted as Ba Jin’s anarchist activities became more focused on his career as a novelist. His efforts shifted away from periodical publication to fiction and translation. In Jones’s case, he regrouped among his international colleagues in San Francisco and among Chinese audiences overseas as well. In Ba Jin’s case, his shift in anarchist activities reveals further the activities of his anarchist comrades in Quanzhou, Fujian. In this way, Ba Jin continued to serve as a node in connecting anarchists.
*** A Pivot in Fujian: Quanzhou, Ba Jin, and Hidden Asian Anarchist Networks
After Ba Jin returned from France in late 1928, he came back to a vastly different anarchist environment in China. He also returned as a vastly different anarchist. He was now a published author and he now exclusively went by the pen name, Ba Jin. His career as author and his identity as Ba Jin were thus set for the remainder of his long life. In his identity as an anarchist, Ba Jin underwent a crisis of faith. From France, he witnessed Sacco and Vanzetti’s execution as told through the press. Through the press, he also experienced the White Terror enacted by the GMD in 1927 and the division of the anarchist movement in China over support for the GMD and over the question of practice and organization. In months prior to the GMD’s purge of communists and leftists, Ba Jin and his colleagues, Wu Kegang and Wei Huilin had tried to influence the course of these debates via a series of essays intended as a public dialogue.[194] In these essays, each took different positions on to what extent anarchists organized, but they did so in a way to invite cooperation and movement building rather than to further divide. However, the existing divide among pro-GMD anarchists and others proved too stark.[195]
In this environment, Ba Jin soldiered on, but he began to despair. The space left for political and intellectual activity was closing. Ba Jin felt increasingly isolated and began drawing further into his career as a novelist. At this time, in mid-1930, Ba Jin left Shanghai for a short trip to Quanzhou, Fujian. There, he would visit anarchists, friends old and new and find his beliefs refreshed. The place he visited in Quanzhou was Liming Advanced Middle School, which is now known as Liming Vocational University 黎明职业大学. Liming’s place as a spoke in the anarchist networks we see around Ba Jin is an important one, and it is here that we begin to foreshadow and see the afterlives of anarchist activities in China.
The history of Liming, Quanzhou, and Ba Jin was (and potentially is) radical and anarchist. Originally Liming Advanced Middle School, the institution that now claims its history, Liming Vocational University, began life as a radical educational project that existed in Quanzhou from 1929 to 1934. Liming Advanced Middle School was a politically progressive institution that was to serve as a bastion of anarchism and radical education. Anarchist intellectuals, artists, and educators from across China—and even Korea and Japan—flocked to Liming to participate in its mission. Further, they flocked to Quanzhou, which was itself a stronghold of anarchism and its particular brand of liberatory ideology.[196] This vibrant and fertile atmosphere attracted the young author and anarchist, Ba Jin, who would strike up a complex and deeply felt relationship with the area.
Ba Jin’s exceedingly complex relationship with Liming and Quanzhou spans two eras. Ba Jin first visited Quanzhou and Liming Advanced Middle School for a month in 1930 and would return for two brief visits in 1932 and 1933. He came to visit anarchist comrades, to take stock of the anarchist scene there, and to write.[197] The experiences he had in school and city inspired him to briefly incorporate Quanzhou and its radical atmosphere into two of his more celebrated novels, *Lightning* 《电》and *Autumn in Spring* 《春天里的秋天》.[198] However, taken in retrospect, Ba Jin’s depictions of Liming and Quanzhou’s anarchist milieu barely covered the school and city’s six years of anarchist education as well as anarchist inspired politics.[199] They only touched upon the numerous strikes and demonstrations led by anarchist influenced labor organizations that filled the city, let alone the schools’ official end in in 1934 in the aftermath of the Fujian Rebellion. In the end, Ba Jin was never to return to Quanzhou and Liming after 1933. His relationship to the school would later transform into one that was spiritual and material.
Liming Advanced Middle School was re-founded in 1981 as Liming Academy 黎明学园, and again in 1984 as Liming Vocational University by Liang Piyun, original headmaster of the school in the 1930s. Liang immediately asked Ba Jin to serve as an honorary member on the school board. Ba Jin obliged, took his honorary position, and donated over seven thousand items of writing in addition to numerous personal artifacts. The beneficence of this literary and material legacy has become the central narrative thread through which a series of Ba Jin Culture Festivals in the 2010s tied Ba Jin to Liming and Quanzhou. They emphasized Ba Jin as an author, famous sojourner, and school donor all the while glossing over the anarchist activities in Quanzhou in which Ba Jin and his colleagues were involved. They created a treasure out of Ba Jin’s inheritance that masks over the radical lineages that animated his original stay.
The Ba Jin Spirit that Liming’s Ba Jin Culture Festivals celebrated emphasize his humanism, his promulgation of universal love, and his spirit of selflessness. Liming did not celebrate Ba Jin’s anarchism, which aspired to an egalitarian society based on a system of mutual aid and the opposition to any coercive system of power, be it political, economic, cultural, social, or gendered. Liming’s image of Ba Jin’s spirit comes directly from current Chinese scholarship on his anarchism which has reached a consensus that although his anarchism was important, it was, in the very end, a romantic ideal. This ideal stood in stark contrast to the more scientifically correct and historically relevant—not to mention historically successful—revolutionary mission of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Party and academics have thus de-politicized Ba Jin’s anarchism so as to avoid any competition with CCP ideology, transforming it into a simple ideal of a future utopia.[200] Scholar Jia Yumin has pointed to a series of disastrous events, from the 1927 Guomindang (GMD) White Terror, to the 1934 crushing of the Fujian Rebellion, and highlights Ba Jin’s own late life admissions of doubt about the efficacy of anarchism to argue that Ba Jin’s anarchism was ultimately a “spirit of selfless giving.”[201] However, such assessments ignore that as late as March 1949 Ba Jin continued to advocate for anarchism. In a letter to the International Anarchist Liaison Commission in Paris, stated, “In Fukien, and only there, there is a libertarian movement. It is not huge but it is real. There is a school there founded by our comrades and a small publishing house that has published ten or so pamphlets....”[202] Obviously, he was not referring to Liming Advanced Middle School, which the GMD had shut down in 1934, but this demonstrated that Ba Jin remained involved and committed to anarchism as a real world cause for human liberation and not just as some vague ideal. In the Ba Jin Culture Festival, though, this tension over anarchism disappeared. Rather, it Ba Jin’s spirit of selflessness and humanism that nicely supports current CCP policy that was showcased.
Liming Vocational University’s commemoration of Ba Jin’s spirit of selflessness, humanism, universal love, and self-reflection further contrived to educate and inspire the young students who attend the culture festival. Guo Peiming, assistant editor of Quanzhou’s *Evening News*, speaking at the opening ceremonies of the 2013 festival, urged students to “carry on Ba Jin’s pursuit of truth and light, his reflexive spirit, his courage ‘to speak the truth,’ his selflessness; and to seek their own wishes and desires, to steadfastly study and create, to deepen life and society, and to enrich Quanzhou’s deep culture.”[203] Other speakers at the ceremonies highlighted this theme. Xu Xuming, assistant head of the municipal propaganda department, similarly exhorted students and attendees to “read Ba Jin’s works, study how Ba Jin acted as a human being, study Ba Jin’s ‘speaking of the truth,’ and his spirit of ‘selflessness.”[204] Festival organizers and participants at the Ba Jin Culture Festival clearly saw Ba Jin Spirit as a way to exemplify the anarchist author’s life as a lesson in civics, all while minimizing his anarchist beliefs. Contemporary discussion of his spirit centered around the man’s morality, and no mention of the relationship of that spirit to his anarchist convictions of ending social, class, and gender oppression is to be found. Liming and Quanzhou have utilized Ba Jin’s spirit as a cultural symbol to produce a sanitized moral paragon through which to mold the youths that Ba Jin often made the center of his work, but not necessarily for the same goals.
One of the more blatant ways in which the festival used its commemoration of Ba Jin’s spirit to influence youth and students was various essay readings and poster contests. Some of these readings were academic and ceremonial, such as book giving ceremonies. One in particular asked students to write on themes related to Ba Jin Spirit and to reflect on how Ba Jin and his spirit shaped their lives. School officials entitled this essay and poster contest *Wo de Liming meng* 我的黎明梦, “My Liming Dream,” and quite obviously extended Xi Jinping’s challenge for Chinese to name their own “Chinese Dream.”[205] The contest’s attempt to merge Ba Jin’s spirit, with its subtly overlooked anarchism, with a national ideological campaign by the CCP demonstrated how Ba Jin’s complex identity has been molded to meet both local and nationwide didactic goals. The anarchism that was so essential to Ba Jin’s identity has been tamed and made safe for consumption. Because the festival smoothed over his radical past, Ba Jin’s very figure has become nothing more than a kindly old *yeye* 爷爷, or grandfather, whose example everyone should follow.
More importantly, what this festival and remembrance obscured is that Ba Jin played a peripheral role in Liming and Pingmin’s history in the 1930s. Ba Jin visited the school and turned his experiences at the school into stories and reminiscences, but more important were the various young, idealistic Chinese, Japanese, and Korean anarchists and radicals who worked and taught at the school. What Ba Jin does then, is serve as a node, as an introduction for figures like Liang Piyun, Wu Kegang, Wei Huilin, Ye Feiying, Fang Tianjun, Lini, Chen Fanyu, and others who were the individuals who shaped Liming and Pingmin’s direction. In highlighting both Ba Jin’s historical relationship with the schools and his current status as cultural capital, the broader experiences and undertakings of Chinese anarchists, and how these undertakings spread locally and transnationally may be revealed.
*** The Spanish Civil War and its Lessons: Same Node, Different Outcomes
As the 1930s wore on, Ba Jin retreated from his life as an activist and propagandist of anarchism. He focused on building his career as a novelist and essayist. However, this change in priorities did not diminish his claim to anarchism and he remained a node of anarchist connections. Ba Jin’s attraction to anarchism had, from the outset, been a matter of faith. His early praising of Emma Goldman and his 1934 published tribute to Goldman, in the form of public letter he wished to have written, is an example of this fixation on faith and commitment.[206] In this public letter, Ba Jin writes of Goldman as his ‘spiritual mother’ and laments to her his crisis in faith, of how the burden of seeing the death of Sacco and Vanzetti, of the tragedies that befell comrades and the political divides in China that only widened, and of how all these have changed who he is. He imagines that Goldman and Alexander Berkman, both think he dead.[207] However, in all of this, Ba Jin sees hope in all that Goldman has taught him and given him, and he dedicates his most recent work to her with the belief that through the world she opened up for him, he will continue on, and one day see her, in Barcelona.[208]
Throughout the 1930s, Ba Jin translated numerous articles on Spain and the Spanish Civil War. Indeed, the Spanish Civil War and promoting its cause seems to have been a preoccupation for Ba Jin. As Ba Jin scholars have noted, Ba Jin had a crisis of faith in the mid-1930s regarding the situation in China and had sought to find ways to carry forward. In this sense, it can be assumed the Spanish cause offered an opportunity for hope.[209] So much so that Ba Jin came under attack for his support of Spanish anarchists. In the heated left-wing debates over how to best confront GMD reticence and how to best fight the Japanese, there were disagreements as to how the various factions of left-wing and left-wing sympathizing groups were to be united. Organizations like the League of Left-Wing Writers were one answer in bringing cultural figures over to the side of the CCP and its guiding policies.[210] Tellingly, Ba Jin did not join the league. He kept himself as an independent writer and thinker for the duration of the wartime period. Nonetheless, his independent stance attracted criticism, especially in the context of both his status as an anarchist and his support of anarchists in Spain during its civil war. For this, Ba Jin was criticized by some on the left as advocating a split among left-wing and progressive forces. In 1936, in what developed into a very public debate, Xu Maoyong 徐懋庸 (1911–1977), a member of the League of Left-Wing Writers, insinuated this while denouncing anarchists in France and Spain for undermining popular front governments in those countries, stating their actions “are no different than Trotskyists, and China’s anarchists, their actions are even more despicable.”[211] Ba Jin responded to these attacks chastising his attackers for misunderstanding what was happening in Spain and not comprehending anarchist undertakings and what anarchism truly represented.[212] In this, he was aided by the famous writer, Lu Xun, who defended Ba Jin’s stance as an unaffiliated writer.
Ba Jin’s advocating for Spain lead to dozens of translations. Many of these translations were reports on anarchist collectives that were established in the wake of the war’s outbreak. These translations also covered the course of battles and other activities of the anarchists and trade unions.[213] Of particular interest to Ba Jin would have been the chance to see Emma Goldman again, this time through translating her speech in remembrance of the famed militant anarchist, Buenaventura Durruti (1896–1936).[214] Durruti spent the majority of his life organizing strikes and uprisings against the Spanish government, going in and out of exile as his militant activities waxed and waned. At the outset of the civil war in 1936, he came to the defense of Madrid, where he was shot and killed by a sniper.[215] In his lifetime of dedication to the anarchist cause, he served as someone who could not but act for the liberation of all. To Ba Jin, he was an anarchist of faith, someone whose experience of suffering in the world inspired a certain commitment to purifying violent and militant action.[216]
In all this, it is important to remember that in these translations and notes, Ba Jin did not use his former anarchist pen names, his anarchist *noms de guerre*. He used Ba Jin, his name as an author. He had left his anarchist polemics behind, but he remained committed to the world that anarchism envisioned and he remained committed to chronicling the lives of those who took up the cause.[217] Aside from appearing in his translating of writings on the Spanish Civil War, anarchism and anarchists appeared in Ba Jin’s fiction. Through the 1930s, his novels, short stories, and autobiographical essays were filled with characters, anarchists and revolutionaries that had been drawn from his earlier polemical phase.[218] It was in these two poles that Ba Jin’s anarchism, when expressed, was to appear. It was in the efforts of others and in the chronicling of their stories. As he noted in a preface to a translation on Kropotkin’s *Ethics* in 1940, he had no hope of reaching a large audience with his translations, but at one time, on a train, he saw a young girl reading one of his translations of Kropotkin. Knowing that there were indeed those among the young who were interested in such matters gave Ba Jin hope. This episode, the feeling of it, is what gave him inspiration and attachment to what was happening in Spain.[219]
The translations he produced were for the most part, published as standalone pieces, usually in self-contained formats. However, Ba Jin’s status as node within Chinese anarchist circles remained, and some of what he translated ended up in the pages of *Jingzhe* 《惊蛰》, his old Sichuan anarchist comrade Lu Jianbo’s anti-Japanese war journal. Like the case earlier in Quanzhou, Ba Jin’s place in the anarchist activities that emanated from the pages of *Jingzhe* was minimal, and what we, as observers see, is a flourishing of anarchist activity that was nodally connected to Ba Jin, but went beyond his anarchist shadow.
Founded in 1937, the Chengdu-based journal *Jingzhe* (1937–1940) sought to link China’s anti-Japanese War of Resistance to global anarchist anti-fascist struggle. Its main editing group, Lu Jianbo (1904–1991), his wife, Deng Tianyu 邓天矞 (n.d.), and their long-time friend, Zhang Lüqian 张履谦 (n.d.), had been heavily involved in anarchist movements in China for close to two decades.[220] Anarchist activity in China, once flourishing in the first two decades of the twentieth century, had faded under the political ascendency of the GMD and CCP in the 1920s and 1930s. However, though anarchism’s fortunes had dimmed, they remained committed anarchists, and their formation of *Jingzhe* represents, in a sense, one last concerted push to
engage still-existing Chinese anarchist communities into action. Attempting to address wartime and anarchist agendas, Lu, Deng, and Zhang filled its pages with articles that joined anarchist revolution with the anti-Japanese resistance. From an anarchist perspective, these articles joined and augmented broader conversations in China as to how and to what purpose the Japanese invaders should be resisted. More importantly, they placed China’s struggle in an international context, linking China’s anti-Japanese war to anarchist anti-fascist resistance in Spain and the rest of the world. Ultimately, *Jingzhe* stopped publishing in 1940 but, for a brief moment, it provided an anarchist voice in approaching the anti-Japanese war.
Lu Jianbo and the other contributors to *Jingzhe* sought “to end war through war”[221] and to “wash blood away with blood.”[222] They reasoned that for anarchism to be an effective ideology of liberation, anarchists had to do more than merely call for peace and freedom. They had to actively pursue peace and freedom. Further, as anarchists, they were not to lead China’s masses of workers and peasants, they were to educate the masses so that they would organize and arm themselves for their own cause. As Li put it, “Our task in this war is not merely to resist the Japanese fascist imperialists’ invasion, but also to guarantee that the political and economic liberties gained through the masses’ sacrifices do not accrue to some “privileged class” or are stolen away by bandits. So, from the masses’ own struggles, we shall solidify and strengthen their organization so that they may resist all power and brutality!”[223] In the article “Kangzhan zhu fangmian” 《抗战诸方面》 (Aspects of the Resistance War), published in March of 1938, writing under the pen name Wu Yun 吴云, editor Lu Jianbo had gone so far as to encourage anarchists to aid the masses in *quanmian kangzhan* 全面抗战 (war of total resistance) that would ensure freedom from both Japanese invaders and future exploitative governments.[224] Lu and others recognized that, philosophically, anarchist thought opposed war but, given the alternative of Japanese conquest, exceptions had to be made.[225] Furthermore, they reasoned, the extraordinary violence of Japanese invasion would only be replaced by the everyday violence of the state, so the people needed to arm themselves to ensure their rights in post-war society.
*Jingzhe’s* authors drew their support for an anarchist inspired war of total resistance from the thought of Errico Malatesta (1853–1932), an influential Italian anarchist who urged anarchists to actively support any and all revolutionary efforts by industrial and agricultural workers. Moreover, they were drawn to Malatesta for his understanding of the importance of violence in achieving revolution. In justifying anarchist participation in the war, the journal quoted a section from Malatesta’s essay, “Towards Anarchism,” which stated, “The normal peaceful course of evolution is arrested by violence, and thus with violence it is necessary to reopen that course. It is for this reason that we want a violent revolution today; and we shall want it always—so long as man is subject to the imposition of things contrary to his natural desires. Take away the governmental violence and ours would have no reason to exist.”[226] *Jingzhe*’s use of Malatesta’s argument, of course, went beyond Malatesta’s original intent of rationalizing armed resistance to state coercion. Malatesta had famously denounced anarchist participation in World War I and had characterized war as nothing more than a tool of capitalism and the state.[227] However, for Lu and the others at *Jingzhe*, Japan’s invasion of China was not just an affair between states. It pitted the forces of capitalism against the labouring peoples of China and Japan, threatening any hope for social revolution in China. In this light, the use of Malatesta, though made to fit China’s current wartime situation, retained the original intent. For the *Jingzhe* group, an anarchist war of popular resistance was as much a tool of wartime mobilization as it was a tool to prevent any future Chinese “demon king from ascending the throne and demanding supplication and tribute from the masses.”[228]
Resistance in China lay at the forefront of *Jingzhe’s* agenda, but anarchist internationalism also influenced its message. From the first appearance of Chinese anarchist groups, enacting international solidarity and revolution claimed equal importance with fomenting revolution within China. This went beyond translating the writings of European and American anarchists. It included forming personal and working relationships with international anarchists and, in some cases, even participating in international movements or inviting international anarchists to China.[229] By *Jingzhe*’s founding, a new international cause came to occupy Chinese anarchist attention: the Spanish Civil War. The prominence and early victories of anarchists in the Spanish Civil War encouraged the remaining anarchists in China. Further, they saw their own country’s plight in the Spanish anarchists’ struggle against Franco’s fascist Falangist party. International anti-fascist solidarity became a rallying point for Chinese anarchists, and *Jingzhe* was an important outpost for this.
The pages of *Jingzhe* were filled with translations of articles and stories on the struggle in Spain. Further, Lu Jianbo and the *Jingzhe* group filled their own polemical articles with declarations of solidarity with the Spanish anarchists. Li Min, in “Anarchism and China’s War of Resistance”, explicitly linked Chinese anarchist efforts to Spain and, also, to the Abyssinian wars against fascist Italy.[230] Lu Jianbo, in an April 1938 article entitled, “Kang faxisizhuyi zhi dong xi zhan” [Anti-Fascist Wars of Resistance, East and West], outlines the similarities in Spanish anarchists’ fight against Franco and China’s war against Japan. Demanding his comrades’ solidarity with the Spanish anarchists, he declares, “We and our Spanish comrades are thoroughly anti-fascist. As we fight against fascism, we will follow in their successes and learn from their failures.”[231] These calls, moreover, were not just rhetorical. Lu Jianbo and his colleagues attempted to establish a Chengdu-based branch of the Solidaridad Internacional Antifascista (SIA). The SIA was an anarchist organization founded in May 1937 in Valencia, Spain that sought to garner support for the Spanish anarchist cause and to provide aid to global anti-fascist movements. Soon after, it opened branches in Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States, France, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Holland, Australia, and China. The April 1938 issue of *Jingzhe* contained the bylaws and statutes of the organization, contact information, and solicited members and inquiries for the Chinese branch.[232] The importance *Jingzhe* placed in the internationalism of China’s anti-fascist struggle served both as a marker of just how connected China’s political and social plight was connected to other parts of the world, and as a reminder of the acute conditions China faced against Japan.
It is in the desire to cast China’s struggles against Japan as a global event that the efforts of Lu Jianbo and the *Jingzhe* group intersect with Ba Jin’s. Both served as nodes of information coming in from international anarchist networks, and both spread that received information amongst their networks in China. However, there is a difference that emerged in their treatments of the Spanish Civil War. Ba Jin’s translation efforts, while lauding the resistance of Spanish anarchists, were a singular effort, meant to inspire others on a personal level. Lu Jianbo and the *Jingzhe* group sought to maintain a larger network and vehicle for anarchist action. However, for both cases, Spanish anarchists provided a means by which Chinese anarchists could think beyond the plight of the nation-state.
*** A Node Revived: Lu, Ba Jin, Agnes Inglis, and “Efforts for Freedom in Other Lands”
After the end of the Second World War, anarchists across the globe attempted to stitch together their shattered networks. Chinese anarchists, too, participated in these efforts. In this, Ba Jin remained a node of Chinese anarchist activity, stitching together disparate communities and networks, however, Ba Jin’s node was noticeably shrunken, noticeably more personal. At the same time, it was Lu Jianbo who took on the more pronounced role of maintaining and linking Chinese anarchist networks to the world. In very different ways, the efforts of both to reconnect Chinese anarchists to the world present an intriguing case of just how long-lasting anarchist activities in China really were. Beginning in 1946 and lasting through 1948, Lu Jianbo in Chengdu, and to a lesser extent, Ba Jin in Shanghai, attempted to reconnect to international anarchist circles. The efforts of these two, particularly Lu Jianbo, demonstrate a renewed commitment, and a sense that anarchism and anarchists still had meaningful implications for both China and the world. However, things had changed and the space for anarchist activity was exponentially smaller. We see this in the case of Ba Jin, whose own commitment to anarchism and anarchist practice had considerably evolved over the course of his professional and personal lives. Whereas Lu Jianbo sought to reconnect and with the broader anarchist world, Ba Jin attempted to re-establish his network of contacts on a smaller scale, one that was more focused on his personal work.
Word of Chinese anarchists first appeared in the English-language anarchist newspaper, *Freedom*, in 1946, with a mention of Lu Jianbo’s contact with Spanish anarchists-in-exile with the *Tierra y Libertad* group in Mexico City.[233] Over the course of the next two years, Lu submitted further status reports to *Tierra y Libertad*, as well as *Cultura Proletaria* in New York, *Freedom* in London, Le Libertad in Paris, *Il Risveglio* in Geneva, and *Universo* in Toulouse.[234] In many of these reports, Lu outlined what remaining anarchists in China were doing. He spoke of schools in Fujian and Nanjing. He spoke of his own work in writing articles and publishing an anarchist journal. He even spoke of Ba Jin’s work in translation and propaganda.[235] Most of all, Lu was interested in obtaining study materials so he could re-build Chinese anarchist knowledge.[236] Further, as Lu described the situation faced by anarchists in China with the war now over, they wished to resume contact and cooperation with their colleagues across the world.[237] In some senses, it can be argued that Lu Jianbo was more interested than Ba Jin in restoring Chinese anarchist connections with their international counterparts at a collective level.
Yet, Ba Jin’s apparent absence in these efforts hides the extent of his connectedness to anarchist circles. In 1948, he served as an intermediary for Japanese anarchists to publish their materials abroad. Sometime after their May conference of that year, the Japanese Anarchist Federation sent Ba Jin a letter with a summary of the conference report. The summary was in Esperanto, and it seems Ba Jin, without translating it into English, sent it on to London, where it was published in *Freedom*.[238] This report then passed through London, and was carried in the Parisian anarcho-syndicalist journal, *Le Libertaire*.[239] After having used Ba Jin as an initial intermediary, anarchists in Japan would go on to directly communicate with the journal and submit status reports.[240] Ba Jin’s efforts on behalf of the Japanese were made possible via earlier contacts he had already established in the 1920s and 1930s. In light of Ba Jin’s efforts to establish formal connections, we come across mention of Lu Jianbo’s own efforts. Famously, in March 1949, he wrote the Commission de Relations Internationales Anarchistes (CRIA) in Paris, unfortunately outlining what slim prospects anarchism had in China: “I cannot give you information on the anarchist movement in China, for to be honest, there is no such movement. Here I sit alone as one, writing and making propaganda....”[241] Yet, this resignation belies the quiet fervor with which he worked to acquire, translate, and disseminate anarchist material in China and throughout the planet. It, moreover, belies the existence of other anarchists in China, namely Lu Jianbo, and his efforts to continue some form of anarchist practice. Most of all, it belies the connections Ba Jin had rebuilt and his participation in a still vital anarchist community.[242]
But, no matter Ba Jin’s commitment to anarchist movements, he was very concerned with re-establishing personal links with likeminded individuals. These links were important for his work involving anarchism. In 1948, he contacted the Adunata group, a group of Italian anarchists based in New York. His reason for doing so was not only, of course, reconnect with other anarchist groups, but also to receive materials. At the time, the Adunata group was attempting to put together an Italian translation of Sébastien Faure’s *Anarchist Encyclopedia*. Ba Jin requested a copy and even sent money as an advance.[243] Actually, a year earlier, Lu Jianbo had asked the same Italian comrades to use Ray Jones in San Francisco as a conduit through which to funnel materials and correspondence.[244] But most clearly of all, the connections that Ba Jin created, reconstructed, and grew in the late 1940s, can be seen in the correspondence he carried out with Agnes Inglis, curator of the Joseph Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan.
Ba Jin and Agnes Inglis’s relationship came about through the shared, globalized networks in which they participated. In the past and the present, they both carried out overlapping correspondences with the same prominent anarchists. This was especially so for Ba Jin in 1948–1950. During these years, in addition to corresponding with Inglis, Ba Jin wrote to Joseph Ishill, Rudolf Rocker, Boris Yelensky, and others.[245] All these individuals were correspondents of Inglis as well. They were both closely connected nodes, albeit unwittingly, in international anarchist networks. His relationship with Agnes Inglis stresses this aspect even more than his interactions with other international anarchists. Since the first letter in his correspondence with Inglis is missing, his initial introduction to Inglis, as far as can be assumed, most likely came from an article on the Joseph Labadie collection in a December 1947 issue of *Freedom.*[246] It was with Agnes Inglis, the connections grown from their correspondence, and her position as curator of the Labadie Collection that he was able to research and embark upon the production of a history of the lives of the Chicago Haymarket anarchists, and to help Inglis grow her repository of anarchist knowledge and contacts.
In terms of content, Ba Jin and Inglis’s letters focused on two main topics. First, he wished to collect documents and articles to help in his translation and historical work. In July 1948, he initially asked Inglis whether the collection had any issues of the Esperanto journals *Libera Labristo* and *Ino Buletines*, published in Paris and Frankfurt respectively, as well as *Der Freie Arbeiter* from Berlin. He had published and translated articles for all three journals, and seemed to need copies for his research notes.[247] Inglis was unable to find any copies of those journals in the Collection, but she was able to send Ba Jin a February 1931 edition of *Probuzhdenie, a* Russian-language anarchist periodical published in Detroit.[248] The February 1931 edition Inglis sent to Ba Jin happened to be a special memorial edition to Kropotkin, who had died ten years earlier in 1921. From the existing correspondence, Ba Jin makes no mention of needing this, but he had been sending Inglis numerous copies of his translations of Kropotkin. Inglis merely seemed to have assumed Ba Jin’s intentions and provided him with the material needed.
Furthermore, Ba Jin’s acquisition and interest in *Probuzhdenie* sent some waves through Inglis’s own correspondence network. Writing later that year, Martin Gudell had suggested to Inglis that should Ba Jin need further information on the journal, “he may get the necessary copies in the administration of the same papers. The editor of the paper lives in Chicago; he is Mr. Maximo[ff]. Darren already knows him and can get the necessary copies through him.”[249] Ba Jin very likely got into touch with figures associated with *Probuzhdenie*, if not Maximoff himself. In a June 1949 letter to John Cherney, an associate of the *Probuzhdenie* group, Inglis seems to intimate that he had dealings with Ba Jin. In the letter, she acknowledges a parcel of books sent by Cherney to the collection. Among the items received, was a copy of Ba Jin’s 1948 reissue of *The Aurora of Spain* by Sim.[250] Ba Jin had sent numerous copies to anarchist groups in America, and there is a strong possibility he had his own dealings with Cherney.[251] Significantly, Ba Jin’s new association with Russian language materials and Russian anarchists encouraged him to take up Russian “to read new books.”[252] At that time, Ba Jin was still publishing his set of *The Complete Works of Kropotkin*, and as translator of anarchist writings, he liked to read and compare multiple translations of a single work. Such an endeavor necessitated his correspondence with Inglis and his broader participation in broader international anarchist networks.
The other main task Ba Jin set for himself and Inglis was to produce a biography of Nina van Zandt, wife of Chicago Haymarket martyr, August Spies (1855–1887). In November 1948, Ba Jin first mentions that he would appreciate it if Inglis were able to “tell [him] about Miss Van Zandt [sic], the mysterious wife of A. Spies.”[253] Ba Jin had long been interested in the 1886 Chicago Haymarket bombing and subsequent trial of anarchist conspirators, which included Spies. He wrote a lengthy history of the event entitled *Ziyou xue*《自由血》(*Blood of Freedom*), and in one of the later chapters marveled at how van Zandt, the daughter of a wealthy family could so be so moved by Spies’s plight that she fell in love with and married him by proxy during the trial.[254] Inglis shared little of Ba Jin’s romanticism, viewing van Zandt not as a mystery, but as merely misrepresented by the public opinion of the day.[255] Nevertheless, she and Ba Jin shared an incredible respect for van Zandt, and compared notes and together went over documents and other materials concerning van Zandt that Inglis had shipped to Shanghai from the Labadie Collection. By 1950, for reasons he left unsaid, Ba Jin was unable to complete his biography of van Zandt, but he still held out that one day the book may come to fruition.[256]
Nevertheless, their work to create a biography of Nina van Zandt inspired them both. They admired van Zandt and each drew motivation from van Zandt’s bravery and passion. Ba Jin was especially motivated by his work on van Zandt. Throughout their correspondence, the tone of his letters became excited whenever van Zandt was mentioned. From December 1948 and into the first few months of 1949, Inglis had almost continuously sent Ba Jin any information she could find about van Zandt. Among the documents she sent were copies of Spies’s farewell letter to van Zandt before his execution and snippets from van Zandt’s correspondence with other radicals and anarchists in Chicago and the Midwest.[257] Ba Jin devoured all this, gushing that “Now I may say that I know Nina van Zandt well, with her sincerity, her enthusiasm, her devotion and her tender heart.”[258] In van Zandt’s person, he seems to have found that spark of revolutionary fervor and romanticism that animated both his own anarchist faith and that of the youth he wrote about in his novels. Inglis too saw inspiration in van Zandt, writing a friend that she “like[d] her ever so much,” and vowed to share what she could about van Zandt.[259] Inglis made good on her word, passing on the fruits of their collaborative research to historians at the University of Chicago later that year and cementing the seriousness of their research.[260] Inglis’s sending of her and Ba Jin’s research to the University of Chicago outlined their commitment to Nina van Zandt’s story, but it also illustrated perhaps the most important aspect of their connection: their desire to create, share, and preserve knowledge about anarchism. For Ba Jin, reading was central to his turn to anarchism. It was his reading of Kropotkin and Goldman that aroused his passion and opened his eyes to the suffering of the world.[261] For Inglis too, providing scholars, movement adherents, and the young access to anarchism’s past was central to her purpose at the Labadie Collection. Inglis did not just want to preserve and document anarchist history, she desired to have it spread and become useful to others seeking a better world.[262] Ba Jin certainly helped this vision. Over the course of their two-year correspondence, Ba Jin donated over forty books, booklets, manuscripts, and pamphlets to the Labadie Collection. Ray Jones, independently and in collaboration with Ba Jin, donated another forty plus.[263] This perhaps is what they saw as the most lasting legacy of their connection, the building of their own node, their own repository of international anarchism, in which the Chinese anarchist experience stood alongside that of anarchists in Europe, the Americas, and the rest of the world. As Inglis notified Ba Jin, the books he and Jones sent were shelved in the sections entitled “‘Civil Rights and Civil Liberties’ and ‘Efforts for Freedom in Other Lands’” and their correspondences were stored in the “Libertarian People File Case—a nice steel file-case.”[264]
More important than that perhaps is the genuine friendship Ba Jin and Inglis gained through their connection. Inglis genuinely cared for and respected Ba Jin. At numerous points during their correspondence, she worried for his and his family’s safety in Shanghai as they faced the hardships of civil war and post-war reconstruction in China.[265] She also expressed this worry to others in her correspondence networks, stating “Probably you feel as I do about Li Pei Kan [Ba Jin]. I await his letter that will tell me how he is situated now.”[266] Inglis’s admiration and concern were echoed in Ba Jin’s own letters. In a letter dated December 29th, 1949, Ba Jin wrote admiringly to Ray Jones, “[Miss Inglis] is seventy-nine years old this year, but she is in the best of spirits. She’s kind to others and I wish she can live even longer.”[267] Ba Jin and Agnes Inglis mattered to each other. Though their connection was brief, two years and a few dozen letters, their shared work, and their shared networks of colleagues demonstrated just how tight-knit the international anarchist community could be.
*** Conclusions: Networks from the Other Side
The various networks revealed through Ba Jin’s associations and correspondences represent a breadth of anarchist activity in China that truly was transnational. Anarchist activity in China flowed both outwards and inwards, and was sometimes equal, and many times not. But what is important in what is revealed in these spokes is just how far flung and variegated they were. There were common themes of education, print culture and knowledge building, but there was enough difference to see how diffuse anarchist activity in China really was. And it is this diffuseness that served later anarchist activities well. It was never a movement that could be crushed, but it was a mode of activity, thinking, and being in the world that would and does lie beneath the surface of a present that has been overlaid by Communists and Nationalists. As will be later shown, anarchists and anarchist ideas and practices lay hidden in the foundations of numerous institutions and movements in the present PRC.
From Ba Jin’s position as a node in these networks, we will now turn to how the connections appeared to those participants who were connected to Ba Jin. In the following chapters, this shift in focus will not only allow us to examine how these networks looked from the other side, but also provide the opportunity to dig further into the activities and networks that flowed out from Ba Jin’s connections. These laid the groundwork for the enduring, and often overlooked, power of this anarchist mode of social engagement in China. The examples discussed in this chapter are merely snippets told from Ba Jin’s perspective, from his vantage point as node. From San Francisco, from Quanzhou, from Chengdu, these networks look very different. They extend out and back into different directions. In many cases, Ba Jin’s activities as a node for anarchist information within Chinese networks obscure the very bright and vibrant projects and undertakings that were occurring.
It is imperative to remember that Ba Jin was one among many anarchists in China, and one amongst a multitude internationally. Ba Jin serves as a ‘bridging node’ for both, but his main service is in revealing the depth of Chinese anarchists’ links to global anarchist movements of the growth and perseverance of the anarchist mode.
** Chapter 3 – Anarchists on the Bay: Ray Jones, Pingshe, and Trans-Pacific Anarchist Networks
*** An Opening Scene – A Chinese Anarchist Arrested Protesting the Deportation of Italian Anarchists
On March 21, 1928, around a quarter to eight in the evening, Ray Jones, leading organizer for the Chinese anarchist collective, Pingshe 平社, and editor of its journal *Pingdeng* 《平等》, stood at the door to his apartment on Stockton Street in San Francisco’s Chinatown.[268] He opens the door and quickly states to his colleague, Zhongfu 仲扶, “I’ve been arrested.”[269] Before Zhongfu has a chance to react Jones enters the small room, accompanied by a lone, heavyset, plainclothes police officer. Immediately, the officer asks, “What are you doing in here?” Zhongfu, still in shock from the appearance of the officer, cannot muster a response. In his stead, Jones tells the officer that Zhongfu is helping him with some piece work.[270] Each bit done earns them fifty cents. At this point, five or six additional officers fill the room. They begin tearing the place apart searching for incriminating evidence. “Are there any bombs or explosives in the place?” one asks. “Shucks, no! But we have found a pistol!” They slap Jones and Zhongfu around as a warning to stop communicating to each other in Chinese.[271] The officers confiscate the pistol and scores of documents, pamphlets, booklets, and copies of *Pingdeng*. Jones and Zhongfu are dragged away to the police station shortly after. They spend a week in lockup before charges are dropped.
As a result of Jones and Zhongfu’s arrest, Pingshe lost a large part of their library and the publication of *Pingdeng* was delayed.[272] However, as Jones and Zhongfu set about their evening activities, there was no inkling of any danger. In fact, as he later recalled, Jones, with the exception of this one time, never remembered any significant confrontations with the police over their radical activities.[273] As the evening began, Jones set out to distribute English language pamphlets on the plight of Armando Borghi, an influential Italian anarchist, while Zhongfu stayed behind in the apartment to work on typing up some materials for the group. Zhongfu had even planned to head out to an evening class around eight o’clock.[274] That Jones and the Pingshe group would be involved in distributing material in support of an Italian comrade was nothing out of the ordinary. *Pingdeng* regularly reported on events involving international anarchist comrades and even included a write up of Borghi’s plight.[275] Members of the Pingshe group, Jones especially, regularly attended meetings and social gatherings of the International Group (IG), a multi-ethnic association of anarchists living in San Francisco.[276] Formed in December of 1927, the IG brought together Russian, Jewish, Latino, Spanish, and Chinese anarchists as a successor group to a prominent collective of Italian anarchists organized around the journal *L’Emanzipacione*.[277] The IG held picnics, fundraising activities, and ran a reading room from a space organized by the Russian section of the association.[278] Jones was a well-remembered figure from these events and was recalled fondly by many of the Italian anarchists active in the group.[279] In one such recollection, Dominick Sallitto describes Jones’s attendance at a lecture by Armando Borghi: “Jonesie came out before everyone else, set up the chairs, listened attentively to Borghi’s lecture—never understanding a word—then put away all the chairs and was the last to leave.”[280] In another, Mark Luca remembers how Jones would receive his mail at his parents’ house on Capp Street.[281] The fondness in these memories of Jones accentuates just how close and intertwined Jones was with the Italian anarchist community in San Francisco.
They further point to the connections made between the various ethnic anarchist hubs that resided in the Bay Area. The IG represented the possibilities of bringing together the various regional, linguistic, and international networks through which anarchist operated. As pointed out earlier, the distinct groups that comprised the IG remained a loose affiliation. Each individual ethnic group retained its own separate organization, but each was brought together through the activities and publications organized through the IG.[282] In this way, Jones and the Pingshe became their own node, and gave to the IG their own trans-Pacific connections to anarchist groups in China and the Sinophone world, and to China and the Sinophone world, they could share news and information gleamed from their transnational comrades in San Francisco.
That such a mélange of international activity was able to happen in San Francisco should not be surprising. Recent scholarship has pointed to how the incredible mixing of peoples in California and the North American Pacific coast in the early twentieth century created moments of possibility for cross-class, cross-ethnic radical activism, and this chapter hopes to add to these contentions by outlining how San Francisco operated as a node, overlaying older Chinese transPacific networks with trans-Atlantic and trans-Latin American immigrant works and creating a space for radical anarchist groups to thrive.[283] The locus of San Francisco’s transnational Chinese anarchist scene, the Pingshe, founded in 1925, and its official organ, *Pingdeng*, which began publishing in 1927 were very much a product of San Francisco’s hodgepodge.
In one aspect, both were very much centered on Chinese communities. They were a localized Chinese American movement that focused on the immediate problems confronting Chinese laborers in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the late 1920s and early 30s. Author and activist Jane Mee Wong has described the group as the lost face of a vibrant Asian-American radical scene that animated Bay Area politics during the era.[284] This radical scene included a wide variety of Asian organized labor unions and collectives as well as a burgeoning cultural wing that included celebrated modernist artists and writers who gave life and voice to neglected Asian-American imaginations.[285] Yet, as seen in the previous chapter, Ray Jones and the Pingshe also operated at one end of a Trans-Pacific Chinese anarchist network that connected San Francisco to Shanghai, Guangdong, and Chinese migrant worlds in southeast Asia. This network can even be characterized as global, as the San Francisco Group maintained contacts with Chinese students and workers participating in the Diligent Work-Frugal Study program in France. Quite simply, their place as a node in these networks was shaped by the activities of the IG and San Francisco’s particular radical cultural in which they participated.
As such, this chapter begins with a short overview of how San Francisco itself served as a node for a variety of radical networks. It was an important site for IWW organizing and actions and as such, was part of a broader Pacific-Northwest arena for the union and other militant labor organizing. This aspect played a role in the development of Pingshe and its undertakings. A notable example of this was perhaps Pingshe’s links to the Chinese Labor Association 中华工党/坎拿大华人工会 of Vancouver, which came about through the sharing of a mutual member, Chen Shuyao 陈述尧 (1887–1944).[286] Chen played an important role in both cities, leading labor organizations and helping to set up the publications that would give voice to radical agendas of these unions. His actions in organizing the groups and individuals that would eventually coalesce into Pingshe are testament to the transnational nature of the Pingshe.[287] The Englishlanguage publication *Man!*, alongside Chen Shuyao and the broader Vancouver and PacificNorthwest connections to radical labor, was another critical network into which Jones and the Pingshe tapped. Launched in 1933, *Man!* was the organ of the IG, and it dutifully reflected the transnational composition of that association. Contributors from across the United States, Europe, and Asia contributed articles that reflected a variety of positions within the spectrum of anarchist thought.[288] Though its run began after *Pingdeng* ceased publication in 1931, *Man!* included occasional articles from Pingshe members, reported on their activities, and printed notices for their publications.[289] Altogether, the confluence of the existing radical environments of San Francisco and the Pacific-Northwest and the disparate groups of anarchists brought together via the IG and *Man!* proved instrumental for Jones and Pingshe’s participation in transnational anarchist movements.
The chapter then moves to discuss how Jones and the Pingshe’s long-lasting though obscured activities were tempered by these networks and surroundings and ends with an overview of the transnational networks that came together in the editing and production of *Pingdeng*. The inclusiveness that served to bring different ethnic groups together under the affiliation of the IG could not entirely withstand the pressures of the Depression, the Second World War, and increasingly strident government responses to radical activities. As the fortunes of the IG waned, the activities of the Pingshe retreated back to the Chinese communities from which they sprang.[290] Nevertheless, Jones and the Pingshe maintained their status as anarchist node and persevered in an attenuated form through much of the 30s. After *Pingdeng* folded in 1931, Jones and his comrades briefly regrouped in 1934 to form the *Wuzhengfugongchanzhuyi lianmeng* 无政府共产主义联盟 [The Anarcho-Communist League] to publish the journal, *Wuzhengfugongchan yuekan* 《无政府共产月刊》 [Anarcho-Communist Monthly], which lasted for seven issues. However, though they were unable to establish a long-lasting journal, Jones and his cohort continued to print and distribute pamphlets and booklets and sell Chinese translations of influential anarchist tracts. In this way, they were able to contribute to a volatile and energetic Asian-American politics.[291]
Jones himself remained active in some capacity as an anarchist through the 1960s, until his death in 1979.[292] Through tracing these exploits, the genesis of radical multicultural and Asian-American politics and how they set the stage for Jones and the emergence of Pingshe and *Pingdeng*, the attempt to revive Chinese anarchist activity in San Francisco, and Jones’s extended career as distributor of propaganda and anarchist supporter, this chapter aims to demonstrate how Chinese anarchists incorporated their trans-Pacific networks into broader, global networks. Such a narrative is essential as their activities were not just limited to overseas connections among Chinese activists. Their connections with other ethnic anarchist groups in San Francisco, particularly Italian anarchists, proved vital in Jones and Pingshe’s longevity. Another key factor in Jones’s longevity was his persona as a working class intellectual, which enabled him to serve as a bridge, bringing together a plethora of anarchist communities. All these factors coalesce to reveal how the individuals and environments that served as nodes made possible multi-ethnic and transnational anarchist practice possible.
*** The San Francisco and Pac-Northwest Scene
In one sense, San Francisco had very early caught the attention of Chinese anarchists. As early as 1907, Liu Shipei 刘师培 (1884–1919), a first-generation Chinese anarchist and member of the Tokyo-based *Tianyibao* 《天义报》[*Natural Justice*] group, included San Francisco’s corrupt politics in his Kropotkin-influenced history of equality, “Wuzhengfuzhuyi zhi pingdeng guan” 《无政府主义之平等观》[“An Anarchist View of Equality]. His attack on San Francisco’s corruption included some very detailed analyses of the political response to the 1906 earthquake and the backroom dealing that chose the winners of mayoral elections.[293] Liu’s take on San Francisco certainly came from a particular polemic angle, but it underscores the importance of the Bay Area and its Chinese communities in trans-Pacific politics.[294] As one of the largest Chinese population centers in the Americas, San Francisco was a site of intense political conflict as the Qing court, reformers, and revolutionaries aligned with Sun Yat-sen and the Tongmenghui 同盟会 (Revolutionary Alliance) all vied for influence in articulating and directing an incipient Chinese nationalism among migrants.[295] Both the Qing and the revolutionaries sought to intervene in the affairs of Chinese migrant enclaves in competing efforts of state building and disciplining. At the same time though, Chinese migrant groups made their own claims on those who sought their support.[296] These tensions over to what, to whom, and in what form should San Francisco’s Chinese communities direct their loyalties was reflected in an incredibly vibrant press. As Him Mark Lai and others have shown, San Francisco’s Chinese participated in a wide-open public sphere, with hundreds of Chinese language newspapers, publications, and journals in circulation.[297] San Francisco’s Chinese actively fought for a modern China able to stand up to the imperial powers of the West. They also fought for better representation in the face of stark political and racial oppression in the era of Exclusion and other anti-Chinese laws, creating numerous workarounds to the draconian immigration and segregation laws of the day.[298]
San Francisco’s place on the west coast also positioned it within a broader Trans-Pacific network of radical ideas and movements. Chinese may have been the most visible Asian immigrants, but other Asian nationalities, including Japanese and Indians populated the Bay Area.[299] San Francisco could even count itself as one of the birthplaces of Japanese anarchist practice, as it was while in San Francisco that Kōtoku Shūsui 幸徳秋水 (1871–1911) first came into contact with anarchist theory while meeting with the San Francisco IWW.[300] Further, San Francisco was a hub in a large network of IWW locals that crisscrossed the western United States and Canada. The Bay Area was a hotbed for Wobbly activity and it was especially in the west that the IWW experimented extensively with multiethnic union building.[301] Much has been made of the sincerity of the IWW’s rhetoric of inclusion given the persistent anti-Asian sentiment in California and the Pacific-Northwest, but it should be noted that there were indeed breakthroughs in multiethnic unionizing.[302]
A major hub in this Pacific Northwest radical labor network was Vancouver. Vancouver itself was an important terminus for Chinese immigration. Though a significant number of Chinese settled in the city, it served as a way point for larger, and often covert, networks of immigration into the US.[303] The anti-Asian fervor there also set in motion Chinese labor organizing. Radical Chinese labor unions and organizations, including a number of anarchistinspired ones, sprung up in the early twentieth century. These unions soon drew the ire of Canadian authorities and the leading organizers found easy transit to San Francisco and the United States, where they could continue their activities.[304] In the meantime, as will be discussed later, Vancouver’s Chinese anarchist labor unions would serve as contacts and occasional financial donors to Chinese anarchist efforts in San Francisco.
*** Ray Jones and Comrades
Ray Jones, known in Chinese as Cai Xian 蔡贤 or Liu Zhongshi 刘中时 (1892–1979) was born in the district of Longdu, in what is now present-day Zhongshan City, Guangdong.[305] Jones immigrated to California in 1909, at the age of seventeen. He spent the remainder of his life in the Bay Area, living in and around Chinatown, and later, sometime after the Second World War, in Oakland. In the last few years of his life, he took up residence in Macao, so as to be closer to his native village.[306] A fervent anarchist, Jones would tell Paul Avrich in their 1974 interview that “I think I was born an anarchist.”[307] Sometime after coming to San Francisco, and in accordance with his anarchist belief, abstained from using surnames and went by variations of Zhongshi 钟时 when in contact with his Chinese comrades. For his English-speaking friends, he adopted the name Jonesie, an Anglicized version of Zhongshi and then R. Jones. The ‘R’ originally stood for ‘Red’, but he later changed it to Ray.[308]
Jones spent his working life in the Bay Area doing an assortment of jobs. In an interview with Him Mark Lai, Jones mentioned he had worked as a “sewing machine operator. [And] once worked in a sewing factory in San Jose, [and] also worked as farm laborer, picking fruits, [and] packing fruits.” For most of his working life, his average daily wage was $1.25, and it was all too evident that he worked well into his advanced years.[309] Jones remained poor, but that did not prevent him from donating what were considerable sums of money, given his meager salary, to anarchist groups and publications in China, the United States, and the UK.[310] In fact, Jones did more than just contribute funds to anarchist fellow travelers; he donated books and other propaganda materials and maintained what was an impressive library of Chinese language anarchist materials.[311] He was a virtual node and library unto himself.
His status as a node is even more evident in his existing body of correspondence. Jones corresponded with a wide variety of figures in Chinese and international anarchist circles. As seen in the previous chapter, Jones communicated extensively with Ba Jin regarding matters related to *Pingdeng*’s publication.[312] Ba Jin had been involved with *Pingdeng* and Pingshe from almost the very beginning. His submitted articles appeared as early as the second edition of the journal, and as Jones later commented, “Pa Chin was our most important writer.”[313] Ba Jin certainly was an important figure in *Pingdeng*’s undertaking, but he was not the only one. Jones communicated with a number of Chinese anarchists from across the Sinosphere, and important locations in the production and editing of the publication appear to be San Francisco, France, and Shanghai.[314] Jones even corresponded with Chinese anarchist sympathizers in Cuba.[315] The extent of Jones’s communications is not ascertainable at this moment given the state of his personal archive, but it is relatively certain, that his contacts and volume of correspondence was greater than what is currently available.
Jones, in his personal papers, demonstrated his commitment to his anarchist beliefs. He was somewhat of an avid composer of poems, and from his remaining drafts, it is quite apparent he worked assiduously on his compositions. In one such poem, on the meaninglessness of war, Jones drafted and re-drafted the verses, building the poem up from a few bare lines:
You who are oppressed serve as soldiers,
Yet do you know what it is you must do?
They teach you to slaughter your brethren,
And in the same way, your brethren are taught to slaughter you.
You who are oppressed serve as soldiers, Yet do you know what it is you must do?
You must kill all those who belong to the working class like you And save that which is called your country.
Your Country? Who said you have a country? You are invariably squatters with no standing, They will never tolerate you having one bit of land! Why should you slaughter each other?
Honestly, you’ve no beautiful courtyard,
And more so, you have no towering buildings or spacious mansion, All that the country has, has already been plundered by the landlords And capitalists.
War? When it comes down to it, there’s nothing to gain.
There’s no need for you to take part.[316]
Anti-war agitation may have been the dominant them, but Jones too wrote of workers, freedom, the evils of the state, and the attainment of knowledge. Given his economic situation, he wrote on whatever paper he could get his hands on. In his later years, he composed on the backsides of old calendars and movie fliers. Despite the intensity and intelligence of his poetry, his handwriting revealed something of a grassroots intellectual. Examining the penmanship of some of his writings, it would be easy to make the assumption that Jones learned to write later in life, but it would also seem it was his working life that had the greater influence.[317] But, if anything, writing and reading were an integral part of Jones’s anarchist commitments.
Perhaps nothing encapsulated these commitments better than a short poem he composed for his collection of books. Entitled “Zhongshi cangshu” 《中时藏书》(“Library of Ray Jones”), Jones hand wrote the poem on the back of a linotype print he seemingly had specially made up for this endeavor.[318] The bookplate depicts a young child sitting cross-legged on a rock next to a stack of books patiently reading through a journal that bears the Chinese title of the poem. The boy, rock, and the books are placed on top of a globe. A tree on the left provides some shade while a star above shines down brilliant light. The English title, “Library of R. Jones” runs down the tree into the globe. On the back flap, there appears the faint imprint of what is possibly the printer’s logo in English, with Chinese below. The poem itself reads as both personal testimony and a caption of the illustration. It begins with Jones narrating how in a dimly lit library, he reads through his books, and through these books he seeks light. It then shifts to a call for youth to take action, stating that his books will dispel the darkness and bring light, and that only in the world of light can freedom and happiness be enjoyed.[319] Given the rough scrawl of some of the characters, it is unclear whether Jones intended this to be given a print run and distributed or as a personal keepsake.[320] Yet, despite the uncertainty of his intent, from this poem, it is clear that Jones viewed himself as a figure, a node, that gave and passed on knowledge. The knowledge that he had gained was meant to be passed on through books and pamphlets he and the Pingshe distributed.[321]
[[m-w-morgan-william-rocks-beyond-the-bounds-of-revo-1.jpg][Figure 1: Library of Ray Jones — Front. Taken from Ray Jones Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, Ethnic Studies Collection, University of California Berkeley AAS ARC 2000/46, Box 1, Folder 2.]]
[[m-w-morgan-william-rocks-beyond-the-bounds-of-revo-2.jpg][Figure 2: Library of Ray Jones — Back.]]
His commitment to his anarchist ideals spilled into his personal letters as well. They further reflected a broader set of resources from which Jones drew his antiauthoritarian positions. Within his preserved papers, there are letters to his father that showcase ardent condemnations of traditional marriage, superstitions, and capitalism. In a letter dated February 28, 1922, he opened by criticizing his family’s insistence on keeping memorial tablets to their ancestors. He was pleased they got rid of other idols and religious artifacts but called their keeping of the memorial tablets as “only partially awakened.” Moreover, he exhorted, “To truly live as humans, you must quickly and thoroughly awaken and go smash such images. Only then will society advance!”[322] Funerary rituals proved to be of special interest to Jones. In 1936, he drafted an essay attacking traditional funerary practices as a repugnant superstition that was nothing but an empty trick. He argued that dead humans were no different than dead animals, and that corpses should just be cremated, and the ashes discarded. Living humans should concentrate their energies on collaborating to make a good society, and not spend their energies in venerating the dead.[323]
Jones’s belittling of superstition was not just limited to ancestor worship. Religion in general drew his ire. No matter friend or foe, he would excoriate any religiously tinged sentiment directed his way. In a draft of a letter he wrote to his compatriot, Xiao Heya 小鹤呀, Jones expressed gratitude for Xiao Heya and his family’s gift of money and a sweater, but followed with a brutal slamming of the Christian language his benefactor used in describing this act of kindness.[324] Jones blasted Xiao Heya’s giving thanks to god, mockingly calling out the latter’s inexperience, “yet, you are young and you have no knowledge of Chinese culture, and you’ve no understanding of this faith. You must wait until you are older and have understanding of scientific truth.”[325] His diatribe then increased in intensity, spending two-and-a-half pages tearing apart the concept of Mary’s immaculate conception, before he ends the missive with a wish for Xiao Heya to grow into someone who does good for society.[326] His vehemence towards religion and superstition certainly can be coded as anarchist, given the ideology’s insistence on doing away with systems of control and hierarchy. But, given also existing anarchist practices of memorializing dead martyrs and revering important figures, Jones’s Chinese identity and experience can also explain his anti-religious rhetoric. In these attitudes, he is clearly tapping into broader Chinese radical discourse against the traditional Chinese family.[327] From this, we must look to the broader worlds in which Jones’s anarchism was formed.
Jones’s cohort within the Pingshe, outside the network of Chinese anarchists surrounding Ba Jin in France and Shanghai are largely a mystery.[328] However, two figures appear from the records as close colleagues. The first was Chen Shuyao, previously described as the influential Vancouver anarchist who made his way to San Francisco following government harassment in Canada. Like Jones, Chen was a native of Xiangshan county (now Zhongshan City) in southern Guangdong. However, Chen’s family seems to have been able to afford him a greater level of formal education, as he studied with individuals who would go on to become influential figures in the Tongmenghui 同盟会 [Revolutionary Alliance] and GMD.[329] Chen went to Vancouver sometime around the mid-1910s, where he began agitating on behalf of Chinese laborers. Through his and others’ efforts, the Chinese Labor Association 中华工党/坎拿大华人工会 was founded in 1916. According to Chen, sawmill workers were the first to join as they were the most organized. This initial group of workers was not anarchist, but after continuous education and propaganda, they soon adopted anarcho-syndicalist principles.[330] The following year, Chinese shingle weavers who were members of the Association worked in tandem with White Canadian shingle weavers in staging an ultimately unsuccessful strike for reduced hours at the same pay.
However, the Chinese shingle weavers struck again in greater numbers again in 1919 and were successful in getting rid of pay cuts. Soon after, they formed the Canada Chinese Shingle Weavers Union 坎拿大木瓦化工联盟, and for a brief two years collaborated with White shingle weavers in a number of strikes.[331] While Association members were striking, Chen and others set up the *Mingxing Xunkan* 《明星旬刊》 as its propaganda arm, and even included an Esperanto section.[332] Because of these successes though, government repression and financial difficulties forced Chen to flee to San Francisco in 1919. The Chinese Labor Association and the Canada Chinese Shingle Weavers Union remained active through the 1920s, and Chen continued to maintain links with the two, but it is at this point he entered the orbit of Jones and what would become the Pingshe.[333]
Fleeing to San Francisco with Chen was the second member for whom there is some historical record, Zheng Bi’an 郑彼岸 (1879–1975). Zheng also hailed from Xiangshan. Further, he was from the same village as Liu Shifu 刘师复 (1884–1915), who, alongside Ba Jin, is regarded as the best-known Chinese anarchist. An intellectually gifted youth, Zheng achieved top marks in the county exam and was awarded a Xiucai 秀才 sometime around the turn of the twentieth century.[334] In 1904, Zheng, along with Shifu traveled to Japan for study. There, they became acquainted with Sun Yat-sen and joined the Tongmenghui. Additionally, it was in Japan, Zheng and Shifu first became acquainted with anarchist thought and practice. In 1912, Zheng, Shifu, and Zheng Peigang 郑培刚 (n.d.), formed the Cock’s Crow Society 晦鸣学舍. However, Yuan Shikai’s 袁世凯 (1859–1916) increasingly oppressive rule drove Zheng to choose exile, and he left for Canada and the United States in 1914.[335]
In Canada, Zheng joined Chen in setting up the Chinese Labor Association and quite possibly the *Mingxing xunkan*.[336] Certainly, Zheng’s experience with Esperanto while with Shifu would have been beneficial in organizing that particular section for the paper. He and Chen fled together to San Francisco in 1919 and the two soon began organizing among Chinese workers there. Zheng later set up a number of schools, served as a typesetter at the *Chinese Times* 《金山日报》, before departing to Hawai’i, and ultimately returning to China sometime in the 1930s.[337] It is hard to say what influence intellectually these two may have had on Jones, but suffice it to say, the networks and experiences they brought would certainly mix and meld with Jones’s own ideals and beliefs. Together, these three would work together in founding Pingshe and helped to put together *Pingdeng*. They were not the only ones, but they very much are a testament to the variety of individuals who participated in the group.
*** Pingshe and its Beginnings
Pingshe’s roots can be traced back to the founding of the Chinese Unionist Guild 美洲工艺同盟中会 of San Francisco in May of 1919. The Unionist Guild brought together a variety of workers, mainly garment workers in what was termed the “white garments” 白衣 section of the industry.[338] The guild came along at a time of change. Garment companies increasingly looked to women to fill their ranks, displacing male workers and driving wages down. Many of the female workers who came into the industry worked at home, making organizing a more difficult matter.[339] Yet, Chen Shuyao, Zheng Bi’an, and other organizers succeeded in getting the Unionist Guild off the ground and arranging it along anarcho-syndicalist lines. Holding their first meeting at the Yeong Wo Association 阳和总会馆, the group decided to send out an initial set of demands.[340] They issued nine demands in total, among which were a nine-hour work day, time-and-a-half for any work over that and double-time for Sundays, employer contributions for insurance and workplace industries, and two-month long apprenticeships.[341] The union met with initial success as most of their demands were accepted by factory and shop owners.
This elated members and the Unionist Guild grew to include agricultural workers. However, changing economic conditions and factory resistance proved to be serious obstacles. Shortly after their initial victories, factory owners formed their own association, and pressure from this association caused a September 28 strike to cave. To bounce back from this and other setbacks, the Unionist Guild had planned to open its own worker-owned and run ‘People’s Factory’. They had bought up land and equipment for the venture, but recession soon hit and their pledged funding evaporated. In the face of this disaster, the Unionist Guild never really recovered. It attempted to rewrite its bylaws and launch its own newspaper, *Kung Sing* 《工声》. But it was to no avail, as the Unionist Guild quietly folded.[342]
Yet, it is within the pages of *Kung Sing* that we have an initial public appearance of Jones, as he is a listed member of General Affairs Committee on the Unionist Guild’s executive.[343] Though he was later less than positive regarding the achievements of the Unionist Guild, there is no question both it and *Kung Sing* played important roles in the establishment of Pingshe and *Pingdeng*. Probably the most prominent point of continuity between the two was their shared offices. The paper’s offices were located at 1129 Stockton Street in Chinatown above what is now a small dim sum parlor.[344] Pingshe would continue to operate out of these offices and the address was listed as their point of contact well into the 1930s.[345] Another point of connection was the paper’s international attention to workers’ issues. *Kung Sing* was very much concerned both with events important to Chinese workers across the world and the activities of their non-Chinese comrades. An image of a worker standing astride a globe, blowing out a call to arms on a bugle fills the title page. The first article in the first issue was a transcript of a speech on the need for labor reform given by Huang Rushan 黄如山 in 1921 at the Guangzhou Workers Mutual Aid Society 广州工人互助社.[346] From there, the paper proceeds through a series of exhortations for workers to wake up before ending with a number of articles and translations on the international workers movement.[347] Worth mentioning among these articles is a duo of pieces concerning Chinese seamen and a short paraphrase of the preamble to the IWW constitution.
The two articles on Chinese maritime workers are an open letter from the Chinese Seaman’s Union 中国海员会 to American journalists and capitalists, and a translation from a response to this letter published in the Chicago-based IWW paper, *Industrial Solidarity*.[348] The open letter was meant as a show of solidarity and excoriated California’s Criminal Syndicalism Act that had come into force in 1919.[349] Zhuo Hongju 卓洪居 (n.d.), union secretary and signatory of the letter, lashed out at the injustice of the law, pointing out that not even China had such punitive measures. Zhuo ended with a warning to the press and businessmen: the Chinese Seaman’s Union would not sit idly by as their comrades were violently abused and oppressed.[350] Zhuo and the union’s statement of solidarity was gratefully received by the *Industrial Solidarity* and the IWW.[351] *Industrial Solidarity*’s writers appreciated the global attention the situation in California was receiving, and even acknowledged that Zhuo and the Seaman’s Union actually understated the severity of the repression suffered. And like its Chinese counterparts, the IWW paper ended with a call for further solidarity and the hope that action would overturn these dire circumstances.[352]
This emphasis on international solidarity was kicked off by a short paraphrase of the IWW’s preamble. The summary published in *Kung Sing* condensed the IWW’s core beliefs into a quick paragraph:
The laboring classes and the boss classes do not share a single bond between them. The masses of the laboring classes lead a life of privation, whereas those boss classes lead an existence of plenty. As such there can be no days of peace. Only when the workers unite as one, take back the land, the means of production, and eliminate the wage system will the conflict between these two classes be over. We must raise the revolutionary banner of ‘eliminate the wage system!’ and do away with the old motto, ‘a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work.’[353]
*Kung Sing*’s use of the IWW as an example of solidarity and rhetoric certainly accentuates its working-class origins and agenda.[354] But, more importantly, it tapped into broader trends into what should the goals and methods of the labor movement be and how certain strains of anarchist practice accentuated that. The late 1910s and early 1920s were a high tide of anarcho-syndicalist organization. Anarcho-syndicalists across Europe and the Americas sought to utilize loose confederations of trade and craft unions to transform the economic structure of society and ultimately revolutionize it. Groups like the syndicalist International Working Men’s Association (IWMA) in Berlin attempted to bring together anarcho-syndicalist groups across the world.[355] The IWW, with its rhetoric of ‘One Big Union’ was invariably caught up in this.[356] More practically, though, with its strong presence on the west coast and its efforts to organize across racial and ethnic lines, the IWW provided a real-life example of solidarity to the workers who made up the Unionist Guild. If anything, these lessons of multicultural and transnational circulation were what stuck with the Pingshe after the guild had faded away.[357]
The Pingshe formed in 1925 after the Unionist Guild had dissolved.[358] Jones later stated that one of the main reasons the guild declined was that its members in the garment industry and moved on to other occupations.[359] The state of the Pingshe’s activities during their first two years is a bit hazy, but it is known the group was active in organizing lectures, distributing pamphlets and publishing. The Trans-Pacific connections to anarchist and labor movements in China that took shape in the persons of Chen Shuyao and Zheng Bi’an remained as well. It is very much through these Trans-Pacific connections that some of the Pingshe’s activities in the years before *Pingdeng* can be ascertained.
Jones had described Pingshe as more a political group whereas the Unionist Guild was a worker’s movement. Yet, while it would seem that efforts to organize workers through a union were not Jones and the Pingshe’s intention, they never ceased agitating for Chinese workers in San Francisco, and propagandizing wherever they could.[360] One of the earliest mentions of Jones and the Pingshe appears in the September 1925 edition of *Minzhong* in the donations section at the end. The journal had been taking collections to help with the printing and publication of their planned series of Kropotkin’s complete works. Though Jones is listed as the sole donor, the amount he donated, $35, indicates that he and his would be Pingshe comrades most likely pooled their available money.[361] Pingshe members next appeared in *Minzhong*’s pages the following year with further donations from Jones and Chen Shuyao, as well as a short history on an organization known as the “ILW”/The Labor World, written by Chen.[362]
Chen’s short article detailing the history of the ILW is especially interesting, as it points to the possible existence of a proto-Pingshe group that had formed in San Francisco around 1920.[363] He describes the group as the only overseas Chinese association amongst many that could be said to not be the lapdog of either government or capitalist interests. They were committed anarchists and propagandists, and further, “they were a group of ordinary workers with no formal learning.”[364] Formed in 1920, this group of ordinary workers and dedicated anarchists operated what Chen described as a fairly extensive printing setup. They had printed “ten thousand copies of Shifu’s anarchist primer “Wuzhengfu qianshuo” 《无政府浅说》[Anarchism’s Principles], one thousand copies of the anthology “Wuzhengfuzhuyi mingzhe congke” 《无政府主义名着丛刻》[Miscellaneous Works on Anarchism] and three thousand copies of the Chinese translation of Leopold Kampf’s (1881–1978) “On the Eve” (“Yewei yang 《夜未央》) in 1921, three thousand copies of Kropotkin’s *Conquest of Bread* (“Mianbao zhi zhansheng”《面包之战胜》) in 1923, and they even sent money to Shanghai for the printing and distribution of his “Modern Science and Anarchism” (“Jinshi kexue yu wuzhengfuzhuyi” 《近世科学与无政府主义》) in the United States.”[365] Chen further details how the ILW’s activities went beyond printing, as they distributed pamphlets on the May 30th Massacre, Labor Day, and a host of radical and Chinese causes throughout San Francisco. They also played an important role in publishing *Kung Sing* as well as the Chinese Labor Association’s *Mingxing* and the France-based Chinese anarchist journal, *Gongyu* 《工余》.[366] Most intriguingly, as Chen writes at the end, they had continued to donate funds for *Minzhong*’s publication of its own anthology of Kropotkin’s complete works.[367] What’s most important about the ILW’s activities is that the pamphlets lies both in the influence of who and what was printed—both Kropotkin and Liu Shifu were among the most commonly printed authors among Chinese anarchist communities—and in that these specific pamphlets formed the foundation of the Pingshe’s printed library. Were we to have further confirmation of the ILW, we would then have an even stronger narrative of how Jones and others came to form the Pingshe.
Chen’s description of how the ILW continued to donate funds to the printing of Kropotkin’s complete works sheds crucial light on the possible ways in which the Pingshe came together in the wake of the Unionist Guild’s dissolution.[368] For one thing, the ILW’s potential existence explains both *Kung Sing* and Pingshe’s connection to France and Chinese anarchists there, and adds another dimension to their links to Canada and the Chinese Labor Association. In its section on associated literature, *Kung Sing* names *Gongyu* as an exemplary work to consult, and interested readers were to send sixty cents USD to the Labor Association’s PO Box in Vancouver for a year’s subscription.[369] The Chinese Labor Association contributed money to *Kung Sing*’s printing as well. Both the Labor Association and the *Gongyu* group continued to be listed as contacts and distribution points for *Pingdeng* a few years later, and the Labor Association continued to contribute funds.[370] As influential as Chen Shuyao’s connections to Vancouver were, this perhaps indicates that both the Vancouver and San Francisco anarchists developed connections that went beyond the personal.[371] Certainly, to appear as each other’s points of contact and distribution hints at a level of coordination and organization that came from deeper personal and structural links.
The ILW’s contributions to *Minzhong*’s own publishing projects further demonstrated just how transnational Chinese anarchist circles could be. As mentioned earlier, Jones’s $35 contribution to the printing fees for the series of Kropotkin’s complete works most likely came from he and other garment workers pooling resources. $35 was not an inconsiderable amount, especially given the money earned through the garment industry. The following year’s contribution, for the next volume of Kropotkin’s works, was too not an insignificant contribution. Though Jones was only able to contribute $4 USD, when totaled with Chen and all the others who contributed (also in $USD), the total comes to $55 USD. Given the average costs of printing in Shanghai at the time, this $55 USD contribution would cover at least a good quarter of the costs.[372] Also, Assuming Jones, Chen, and the other twelve contributors were members of the ILW, this would match the number of individuals Jones had mentioned as actively belonging to the Pingshe.[373] The Trans-Pacific anarchist network facilitated through these and other actions would persist into the Pingshe’s activities and beyond.
More concrete mentions of the Pingshe followed later in 1926. November of that year saw advertisements for a series of pamphlets distributed by Pingshe advertised in the *Chung Sai Yat Po* 《中西日报》, an influential paper published in the Bay Area.[374] The following month, the group appeared again in the pages of *Minzhong*. This time, it was in an advertisement for their published pamphlets and booklets. Two items were advertised, a brief biography of Kropotkin and a history of the 1886 Chicago Haymarket Bombing.[375] No address or instructions for receiving the material was listed. However, it may be assumed that these were items most likely ready for distribution from *Minzhong*’s headquarters in Guangzhou. If not, *Minzhong* would most likely receive regular shipments from San Francisco. Another possibility would be that these were materials for the Pingshe that were printed in China with some copies saved for domestic distribution. All three possibilities are valid given the ways that the Pingshe operated in terms of its printing, receiving, and distribution of materials.[376] Moreover, just as Pingshe materials were available for distribution in China, Chinese anarchist publications were also distributed by the Pingshe in San Francisco and the United States. The March 1927 edition of Lu Jianbo’s *Minfeng* listed the Pingshe as its contact in America.[377] These mutual points of contact would later be replicated in the pages of *Pingdeng*, with both *Minzhong* in Guangzhou and *Minfeng* in Shanghai being listed as representatives for the San Francisco group.[378] The exact numbers of the circulation of materials within this Trans-Pacific circuit are unknown, but from these exchanges, the ability of Chinese anarchists to disseminate literature and information was quite sophisticated, and moreover, rested upon both already existing networks of transmission and new lines created by their transnational radical affinities.
These exchanges were further accentuated by the ways in which significant events at either end of this connection showed up in each other’s pages. In the months leading up to the first publication of *Pingdeng* in 1927, the activities of the Pingshe burst onto the pages of *Minfeng* and *Minzhong*. In the February 1927 edition of *Minfeng*, in the international news section, a report from Jones and the Pingshe appeared. It was on their publication and distribution of a pamphlet earlier in the year. The pamphlet was published and handed out on that year’s Double Tenth 双十, celebrated as the Republic of China’s founding.[379] The pamphlet, entitled “Jinggao qingzhu suowei shuangshi jie zhe” 《警告庆祝所谓双十节者》[“A Warning to Those Who Celebrate What is Referred to as The Double Tenth”] was composed in a manner meant for recitation and, according to them, was quite catchy and caused a stir.[380]
The report contained a transcription of the pamphlet’s entirety. It began by calling the fall of the old feudal system and the rise of nationalism one in the same. Both stupefied the people with talk of enriching the nation and bringing fortune to the people, and all of it smelled of dog farts. It then went on to paint China’s new leaders as corrupt warlords and call the Double Tenth celebration a terrible joke. It and other celebrations like it were farces that obscured the true history of the people, that originally, there were no countries or boundaries and that all were equal. States were meant to control and bind people. Further, that the present imperialism suffered by China arose through patriotism, and such patriotism invariably came at the expense of others. True freedom and equality came in the destruction of national borders, the burning of barbaric national flags such as China’s five color flag, and the casting aside of the Double Tenth and other meaningless national holidays.[381] It ended with the maxim, “The world has no borders; this is the most rational of truths. Should the peoples remember this, then a grand unity can be one day reached.”[382] The effect of this pamphlet, as reported by the Pingshe, was felt by the larger Chinese community. It apparently caused such a commotion that the San Francisco branch of the GMD straight away issued a poster to counter. This poster argued that the Pingshe were riff raff who were incapable of saving the nation and had bandied off to distant shores, and the reasons they wanted to do away with the national holiday and the national flag was they were foreign ingrates who had no such symbol of their own.[383]
Through the course of its lifetime in the 1920s and 30s, the Pingshe printed and distributed numerous pamphlets that agitated for both transnational and domestic causes. As they were deeply enmeshed within their own community, the plight of San Francisco’s Chinese workers was a common subject. In January 1929, Pingshe members circulated pamphlet titled, “Huagong jiefang jihui dao le!” 《化工解放机会到了》 [A Chance for Chinese Workers’ Liberation!] in support of a strike called by the Chinese Laundry Workers Union 西福工会.[384]
The pamphlet reads:
The Xifu Gonghui is on the front line and we should all respond!
We Chinese workers in America have suffered the inhumane treatment of the proprietors for over 70–80 years. We have never heard anyone asking for a strike to achieve reforms. This time, the Xifu Union strikes and it may be an action that will allow us Chinese workers in America to smash through our desolation. Even though we are not completely satisfied with their limited demands, we admire their bravery and resolute spirit. Our group, in addition to acting in solidarity with the Xifu Union, has also issued countless proclamations to the entire mass of our beloved Chinese in America. The ancients used to say, ‘even though one has wisdom, it is not as good as acting.’ In this present heightened situation, it is a rare opportunity for our liberation. Should all our fellow workers across the multitudes of industry belong to a union, they should act in solidarity. If they do not, they should immediately organize one! Fellow Workers! The 10 hour day is inhumane and unbearable! Arise! Arise! Quickly band together and never again serve as draft animals!
We have one more sentence to exhort you with: All governments are our enemies. We never will be used by them or their attached organs![385]
Pingshe would repeatedly hammer at these themes in their other pamphlets. In some cases, they would take older pamphlets and edit and expand them to meet their current needs. Expanding their rhetoric to American workers as well as Chinese, they broached multiethnic solidarity and action. A decade later, Jones and other Pingshe members edited the earlier 1929 pamphlet in support of the successful ILGWU-organized strike by female Chinese garment workers against the National Dollar Stores 中兴公司.[386] Keeping the original title, Pingshe members added language to the original text to reflect women’s equality and multi ethnic solidarity.[387] It clamored for “All workers, regardless sex, nationality, race [to] unite and rise up” and further expanded its call to arms against governments, calling out for workers to “believe in yourselves! Arise and take responsibility for your own interests; arise and wage battle for your freedom and lives!”[388] These were two of the more prominent examples, but the Pingshe produced and distributed a copious amount of anarchist propaganda for public consumption.[389] Though they lacked the organizing abilities and impact of mainstream unions and communist organizations, they maintained enough of a presence to be felt in the community.
To expand upon this point, the above-mentioned confrontation with the GMD certainly was not the only time the two group locked horns. One of Pingshe’s more enduring booklets was an attack on the GMD, “Wo de guomindang guan” 《我的国民党观》 [My Thoughts on the Guomindang], written by Shen Zhongjiu. Originally published in China-based anarchist journals, it was reprinted by the Pingshe. It engendered polemical responses from GMD adherents and party members and developed into something of a back and forth within the pages of *Pingdeng*.[390] This was not necessarily the same as what happened on the streets of San Francisco, but it is significant in how anarchist communities on both sides of the Pacific engaged with other political actors. It also revealed just how seriously their provocations were taken by formal political organizations like the GMD. For as much as anarchists thrived in the ideological debates contained within their publications, they too engaged in real life political actions. In Jones and the Pingshe’s case, their presence on the streets in and among San Francisco’s Chinese community testifies to the transnational impact of both their intellectual and personal commitments.
*** Pingdeng as an International San Francisco Journal
An announcement from Zheng Bi’an about the Pingshe’s intention to expand its operations appeared in *Minzhong* in March 1927. Stating the group’s intentions to his comrades in China, Zheng cut an inspiring promo:
The *Pingshe* group in San Francisco, wishing to disseminate its propaganda organs, plans to disseminate thousands of leaflets and pamphlets this year and undermine the vile and despicable patriotism of overseas Chinese in North and South America. If there is even the slightest of light, then our group will gain. The present comrades of this group will put forth exceptional effort, holding meetings each week, and develop the group.[391]
*Pingdeng*’s first issue would appear on July 1 later that year, and altogether, would run to 1931 with a total of 23 issues.[392] Its mission statement as to the transnational venture of its composition and transnational politics was quite explicit:
(1) This journal is a collaborative effort by affiliates of the Pingshe residing in America and Europe. Its content, in addition to its main focus of propagating anarchism and serving as a record of news on the anarchist movement, will also provide news on Chinese workers in Europe and America, as well as paying attention to comrades all over the world. If you have any piece of news related to the above topics, we heartily welcome them.
(2) This journal is gratis. Those wishing to read it please send us an envelope with your address and we will send the relevant issue. Should your address change, please send a letter to let us know.[393]
It emphasized not only the already longstanding Trans-Pacific corridor that the Pingshe had actively participated in, but also revealed the extent of global Chinese anarchist networks. It further revealed just how truly transnational *Pingdeng* and the Pingshe truly were.[394] It covered global anarchist and labor movements and its authors, correspondents, and editors were spread across the world. In Ba Jin’s case, as a major contributing author and member of the editing group, he would have been sending his articles from France in 1927 to 1928. In 1929, he was writing, editing, and overseeing from Shanghai.[395] From San Francisco, Jones and the Pingshe would have managed articles and news concerning Chinese communities in the United States as well as labor movement news from there. They also handled *Pingdeng*’s distribution in San Francisco and elsewhere.[396] *Pingdeng* was meant for consumption by a Chinese audience in America, but at no point in its existence was it just an American Chinese publication—it was connected to China and to Chinese in Europe and elsewhere.
*Pingdeng*’s transnational status was further reflected in its list of contacts, donors, and well-wishers. It listed the Chinese Labor Association in Vancouver and Tchou Youpan (Zhu Yangbang), a colleague of Ba Jin in France, as international contacts and distributors. *Minzhong* and *Minfeng* also appeared on the list.[397] Moreover, a number of donors’ names matched those of donors who contributed to *Minzhong*’s series of translations of Kropotkin and may have been part of the ILW described by Chen Shuyao in 1926.[398] Followers in Cuba also appeared among the donors, having donated two weeks of their group’s membership dues. *Pingdeng* also directed its readers to important English-language anarchist publications, namely New York’s *Road to Freedom* and London’s *Freedom*.[399] The presence of these individuals and groups showcased just how widespread the Pingshe’s networks were within both the broader overseas Chinese communities. Congratulatory poems from Chinese anarchist groups across North America provide clues as to a more widespread presence of Chinese anarchists in general. The Chinese Labor Association in Vancouver, the Renshe 仁社 in Los Angeles, the Jueshe 觉社 in New York, and the Heishe 黑社 in Mexico all contributed verses in honor of *Pingdeng*.[400] The acknowledgement of these groups within *Pingdeng* was a manifestation of small and dispersed, but active Chinese anarchist communities across the US and North America. Marginalized by history and more prominent organizations, they nonetheless remained a vital undercurrent within their respective localities.
Two important points must be made here. First, their intention that *Pingdeng* would devote space to both recording news of the labor movement and propagandizing anarchist activities and theories highlighted tensions underscored in Jones’s later recollection that Pingshe was more of a political group rather than a workers’ group and that they failed to have a lasting impact.[401] While *Pingdeng* certainly devoted ample space to articles on the labor movement, there was a tension within its pages in regards to an increasing prevalence of ideological and theoretical content.[402] This tension only became more pronounced when one looks at the shift in content that occurred once Ba Jin and the other main editors returned to Shanghai in 1929.
During the first two years of its run, *Pingdeng* made regular use of the group’s TransPacific connections to report on matters concerning labor movements in Guangdong and other parts of China, as well as their transnational connections to report on activities the United States and other parts of the world. In the second issue of the journal, the group reported on the worrying state of anarcho-syndicalist unions in Guangdong since it had become a GMD-CCP base during the First United Front.[403] The same issue also contained a history of the Japanese anarchist movement. Likewise, *Pingdeng* often contained news briefs and summaries of proceedings from major international anarchist and labor conferences. Most of these conferences took place in Europe, so European connections as well as keeping abreast of the international anarchist press were key to translating and printing these events in their journal.[404] Through the first two years, there was enough reporting on the goings on of anarchists and anarchist labor unions to give an in depth sense of the vitality of transnational anarchist practices.
In 1929, the tone and content changed, with more articles on anarchist history and ideas and a greater focus on events in China and anarchist conflict with the GMD. After the August 1928 edition, the journal paused publication for the next four months. Jones’s arrest in March 1928 and the resultant loss of materials and literature from the police raid certainly played its part. Financial difficulties also proved difficult to overcome. The return of Ba Jin to Shanghai in late 1928 factored as well. The main editing group’s move to Shanghai and subsequent transformation in scope and tone did not mean the Pingshe and *Pingdeng*’s transnational links were broken. Donations still came in from the Trans-Pacific network.[405] The editorial board still translated essays and poetry from a range of international anarchist thinkers. Issues of *Pingdeng*, pamphlets, and booklets were still mailed from Shanghai to San Francisco, and from there shipped to readers across the Americas. However, the disappearance of news on worker and anarchist activities did hide the presence of those people who anarchists claimed to fight alongside.
Secondly, focus on this tension, however, obscures the significance of their activities and commitment. Though Ba Jin and his cohort in France and Shanghai may have been highly educated intellectuals, the majority of Pingshe’s memberships came from working class backgrounds. They read anarchist texts voraciously, but Jones and the Pingshe would more readily be called grassroots intellectuals.[406] Further, as much as they were tied to a transnational anarchist world, they were very much of San Francisco and Chinatown. That China’s post ordered their materials confiscated was important, but more important was the harassment they received from the local police and from the factories and shops at which they worked. More important was the obstructions from the conservative Chinatown elite they dealt with on a frequent basis.[407] In the late 1930s, Jones joined other anarchists in contributing funds to Spanish anarchists fighting against Franco’s Falangist forces in the civil war. However, when asked to donate to China’s war against Japan, he refused. One must assume he believed donating his hard-earned money to some future GMD victory was a betrayal of his beliefs. For this, he was beat up by thugs from the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association.[408] Through this all, Jones never wavered in his adherence to being an anarchist.
*** Conclusions: The Anarcho-Communist League, *Man*!, and a Return to R. Jones’s Library
*Pingdeng* printed its last issue in 1931, yet the Pingshe continued. Jones and his anarchist comrades continued to print booklets and leaflets to distribute on the streets of Chinatown. In 1934, they even reformed under a new name, the Anarcho-Communist League, Wuzhengfu gongchan zhuyizhe lianmeng 《无政府共产主义者联盟》, and published a sevenissue journal, *Anarcho-Communist Monthly*, *Wuzhengfu gongchan yuekan* 《无政府共产月刊》
. They even published a few leaflets and fliers under this new name.[409] Most notably, the group for its brief time, made tangible, the promise offered by the formation of the International Group in late 1927. When Jones and Zhongfu were jailed in 1928 for distribution of illegal leaflets, their comrades in the International group helped arrange bail, and further helped Jones and Zhongfu secure documents stating they had been born in the United States.[410] This sense of solidarity would emerge again around 1933, with the publication of *Man!* under the editorship of Marcus Graham. Jones and the Chinese anarchists contributed in various ways to the paper. Among the more prominent contributions were the visually arresting imaged provided by David P. Chun 陈觉真 (1898–1989), whose linotype prints filled *Man!*’s pages.[411] *Man!* also carried the aforementioned history of the Pingshe by R. Tong as well a short essay on utopia they wrote. Other briefs on the situation of anarchists in China followed, presumably sent on to *Man!* through the Pingshe.[412] Aside from making known the plight of Chinese anarchists, Marcus Graham and *Man!* also distributed copies of the *Anarcho-Communist Monthly* on behalf of Jones’s group.[413] The *Anarcho-Communist* *Monthly* shut down at the end of 1934, but the Jones and others continued in their anarchist exploits.
In the end, the Trans-Pacific network of Chinese anarchists never was truly gone. Materials were still traveling back and forth even as most Chinese anarchist groups ceased to exist. Individual anarchists like Jones still soldiered on printing, collecting, mailing, and distributing materials. As we have seen, even without an official organ, the Pingshe was still active in various guises handing out leaflets and doing what they could to promote their message. Even before *Pingdeng* and the *Anarcho-Communist Monthly* faded away, Jones began a new partnership with Agnes Inglis at the University of Michigan.[414] As early as 1930, Jones began sending over Chinese anarchist texts to the Labadie collection there. Inglis was most grateful for Jones’s donations to the collection and was proud to share them with any interested Chinese student. Given Jones’s location, she wondered whether it was Marcus Graham who had introduced Jones to the collection.[415] We do not have Jones answer, but given his and the Pingshe’s extensive transnational ties, it is easy to imagine what it could have possibly been.
** Chapter 4 – An Anarchist History in Three Acts: Quanzhou’s Liming Advanced Middle School and Pingmin Middle School as Scholarship, as a Record of Overseas Chinese, and as a Celebration of Ba Jinology
*** Anarchists in between and among
The networks that drew together Chinese anarchists within China and across the Pacific as well as connecting them with international colleagues in Europe and the Americas during the 1920s and 30s existed in a complex web of social and political realities that often obscured their existence. These realities that obscured anarchist activity have been further compounded by questions and narratives through which historians have sought to understand the period. Narrative focus on Chinese nationalism, the communist party, and the remaking of the Chinese nation during the twentieth century has served to occlude efforts like those of the anarchists that were on the margins of grander national imaginations. Since the 1990s, Prasenjit Duara and other historians have sought to deconstruct singular, national teleologies by drawing attention to “bifurcated narratives” that gave voice to the efforts of actors who sought out different forms of community and society.[416] In the main, these efforts are not an attempt to rewrite the what happened, but to de-center singular, rigidly narrow narratives of the inescapable building of the Chinese nation-state.[417] In the case of Chinese anarchists, such efforts would entail moving past the traditional teleology of the 1927 GMD purge, the subsequent failure of the anarchists, and the rise of the CCP as the bona fide leaders of the Chinese left.
With such an effort in mind, the case of Liming Advanced Middle School 黎明高中, Pingmin Middle School 平民中学, and the southeastern port city of Quanzhou in Fujian provide an illustrative example.[418] Liming and Pingmin were both anarchist-founded and run schools in operation from 1929 to 1934. Their location, in Quanzhou, which was considered to be a haven for anarchist activity, offered an opportunity for social agitation and revolutionary education.[419] The existence of these two schools and their relative longevity contest the staider narratives of anarchist failure and disappearance from China’s social and political scene. That the anarchists lost out to the GMD and the CCP after 1927 is a fact, but the way in which it happened was not destined nor the result of historical logic.[420] While anarchists lost their political and social standing, they continued to actively seek out means by which they could organize and work for their envisioned revolution. Liming and Pingmin are just but two examples of continued anarchist activity in China. Further, their presence in southeastern China and that of the several Japanese and Korean anarchists who flocked to the schools emphasize the transnational nature of not just anarchism in China, but also the international trajectory of China’s revolutions in Asia and the globe.
Another facet of accepted narratives of Chinese anarchist history these schools deconstruct is the primacy of Ba Jin’s identification as the Chinese anarchist par excellence. For the most part, narratives of Liming and Pingmin have been narratives of Ba Jin’s relationship to the schools and the attendant cultural cachet it brings. However, within the history of Liming and Pingmin, Ba Jin was at best a marginal figure whose main role was to insert his experiences there into his writing. Rather, the leading protagonists at the schools were Liang Piyun 梁披云 (1907–2010), Qin Wangshan 秦望山 (1896–1970), Xu Zhuoran 许卓然 (1885–1930), Wu Kegang 吴克刚 (1903–1999), Ye Feiying 叶菲英 (1906–1961), Chen Fanyu 陈范予 (1901–1941), Guo Anren (Lini) 郭安仁(丽尼) [1909–1968], and others who served as teachers, administrators, and backers.[421] His association with the schools offers public exposure they may otherwise have lacked, but he was never the focal point of Chinese anarchist activity there. However, moving past Ba Jin’s centrality in the narratives around the Quanzhou anarchists necessarily means using Ba Jin as a window through which to get at what they were doing. We cannot tell the story of Liming and Pingmin without Ba Jin, but we can frame it in such a way to better appreciate Ba Jin’s role as node and observer in a more historically contextualized manner.
Liming and Pingmin’s stories present special challenges to both the mainstream narrative of Chinese anarchism and the way in which it has been constructed. Like much of anarchist history, institutional records are scarce and witness testimonies and secondhand accounts are colored by strong biases for and against anarchism. In Liming and Pingmin’s case, later memoirs culled from anarchists have been shaped by revolutionary frameworks championed by the CCP.[422] This, coupled with the way in which Ba Jin has come to dominate the histories of the two schools, not only downplays the radical social and political activities that animated the locales, but also gives insight into the choices and values present day histories emphasize in their re-telling.[423] To get at these choices, this chapter begins by examining Ba Jin’s centrality to Liming and Pingmin’s narratives through recent efforts to commemorate his relationship with the schools. From there, it will discuss the current scholarly narratives that surround the schools, and end with an overview of Liang Piyun’s memorialization and placement in Liming’s narrative. Liang was a Fujian native, anarchist, and first headmaster of the school. As in Ba Jin’s case, Liang’s career after Liming has come to shape its historical reception, but his person also provides a local alternative to Ba Jin and emphasizes the region’s radical and transnational pasts in ways that Ba Jin’s story cannot.
By proceeding from the current focus surrounding Ba Jin’s time at the school back to the narrative of the schools’ time and returning to present day celebrations of Liang Piyun the chapter aims to serve as a bridge between the themes emphasized in Chapters 2 and 3 and those covered in Chapters 5 and 6. The initial two chapters cover the global reach of transnational Chinese anarchist practice while the latter two revive forgotten memories of anarchist practice eclipsed by war, the CCP, and the GMD. In focusing on what Liming and Pingmin’s histories have become, this chapter endeavors to reveal the complex, transnational networks that came together in the founding the schools, and how the legacies of these networks can help us better understand current efforts to reimagine Quanzhou and Fujian’s identities. Both schools came about through the overlapping of transnational anarchist networks with older Fujianese migrant and revolutionary networks throughout the Nanyang and recognizing this is essential to disentangling official narratives.
*** Ba Jin’s Time in Quanzhou as a Site of Celebration
From 2012 through 2016, Liming Vocational University 黎明职业大学 and the southeastern port city of Quanzhou, Fujian, joined forces to hold the Ba Jin Culture Festival in celebration of anarchist author, Ba Jin.[424] The festival commemorated and taught Ba Jin’s historical connections to Liming and Quanzhou. Such commemorations like the Ba Jin Culture Festival, as anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot has observed, “sanitize...the messy history lived by the actors...they help to create, modify, or sanction the public meanings attached to historical events deemed worthy of mass celebration....”[425] Certainly, the culture festival memorialized Ba Jin’s humanism and his cultural contributions to the area. It positioned him as symbol, spokesperson, and culture-giver of school and city. However, the Ba Jin Culture Festival obscured the complex anarchist and radical pasts that color Liming, Quanzhou, and Ba Jin’s histories. In so doing, it has created an educational and commemorative public experience that illuminates larger issues of how non-communist figures like Ba Jin are enshrined in China’s twentieth century history, and how that history is disseminated to students and the public.
Ba Jin’s exceedingly complex relationship with Liming and Quanzhou spans two eras. Ba Jin first visited Quanzhou and Liming Advanced Middle School for a month in 1930 and would return for two brief visits in 1932 and 1933. He came to visit anarchist comrades, to take stock of the anarchist scene there, and to write.[426] The experiences he had in school and city inspired him to briefly incorporate Quanzhou and its radical atmosphere into two of his more celebrated novels, *Lightning* 《电》 and *Autumn in Spring* 《春天里的秋天》.[427] He also incorporated figures and episodes from his time in Quanzhou into a number of short stories.[428] However, taken in retrospect, Ba Jin’s depictions of Liming and Quanzhou’s anarchist milieu barely covered the school and city’s six years of anarchist education as well as anarchist inspired politics.[429] They only touched upon the numerous strikes and demonstrations led by anarchist influenced labor organizations that filled the city. In the end, Ba Jin was never to return to Quanzhou and Liming after 1933. His relationship to the school would later transform into one that was spiritual and material.
Liming Advanced Middle School was re-founded in 1980 as Liming Academy 黎明学园, and again in 1984 as Liming University 黎明大学 by Liang Piyun, the original headmaster of the school in the 1930s. In the late 1980s it was re-christened as Liming Vocational University. During the re-founding process, Liang asked Ba Jin to serve as an honorary member on the school board. Ba Jin obliged, took his honorary position, and donated over seven thousand items of writing in addition to numerous personal artifacts. The beneficence of this literary and material legacy has become the central narrative thread through which the Ba Jin Culture festival ties Ba Jin to Liming and Quanzhou. It emphasizes Ba Jin as an author, famous sojourner, and school donor all the while glossing over the anarchist activities in Quanzhou in which Ba Jin and his colleagues were involved. It creates a treasure out of Ba Jin’s inheritance that masks over the radical lineages that animated his original stay.
This section examines how Liming and Quanzhou’s Ba Jin Culture Festival ironed out this complex history through its veneration of what it terms a didactic Ba Jin Spirit, its display of a material Ba Jin Culture, and the deployment of a Ba Jin Brand, that is, the transformation of Ba Jin into a tourist attraction for the city’s recent 2013 title of “East Asian Cultural City.” By tracing the meanings of these three versions of Ba Jin in Quanzhou, this section hopes to address how Liming and Quanzhou’s didactic re-appropriation of Ba Jin’s image creates an educational and commemorative public event that furthers their academic, social, and political agendas. The Ba Jin Spirit that Liming celebrates emphasizes his humanism, his promulgation of universal love, and his spirit of selflessness. It does not celebrate Ba Jin’s anarchist beliefs, which centered on the hopes of an egalitarian society based on a system of mutual aid and the opposition to any coercive system of power, be it political, economic, cultural, social, or gendered. Liming’s image of Ba Jin’s spirit comes directly from current Chinese scholarship on his anarchism, which has reached a consensus that although his anarchism was important, it was, in the very end, a romantic ideal. This ideal stood in stark contrast to the more scientifically correct and historically relevant—not to mention historically successful—revolutionary mission of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Party and academics have thus de-politicized Ba Jin’s anarchism so as to avoid any competition with CCP ideology, transforming it into a simple ideal of a future utopia.[430] China-based scholar Jia Yumin has pointed to a series of disastrous events, from the 1927 Guomindang (GMD) White Terror, to the 1934 crushing of the Fujian Rebellion, and highlights Ba Jin’s own late life admissions of doubt about the efficacy of anarchism to argue that Ba Jin’s anarchism was ultimately a “spirit of selfless giving.”[431] This point bears some truth, as by the 1930s, Ba Jin did not count himself among his anarchist brethren. However, such assessments forget that as late as March 1949 Ba Jin, though perhaps not counting himself as among Chinese anarchists, nevertheless remained conversant with their doings. In a letter to the International Anarchist Liaison Commission in Paris, stated, “In Fukien, and only there, there is a libertarian movement. It is not huge but it is real. There is a school there founded by our comrades and a small publishing house that has published ten or so pamphlets....”[432] Obviously, he was not referring to Liming Advanced Middle School, which the GMD shut down in 1934, but was most likely referring to Minsheng Agricultural School 民生农校, a successor school to Liming and Pingmin that lasted well into the PRC-era. Such knowledge could only come from a continued commitment to anarchist ideals and those who practiced them. In the Ba Jin Culture festival, though, this tension over anarchism disappeared. Rather, a spirit of selflessness and humanism that nicely supports current CCP policy was showcased.
Liming Vocational’s commemoration of Ba Jin’s spirit of selflessness, humanism, universal love, and self-reflection contrived to educate and inspire the young students who attended the culture festival. Guo Peiming, assistant editor of Quanzhou’s *Evening News*, speaking at the opening ceremonies of the 2013 festival, urged students to “carry on Ba Jin’s pursuit of truth and light, his reflexive spirit, his courage ‘to speak the truth,’ his selflessness; and to seek their own wishes and desires, to steadfastly study and create, to deepen life and society, and to enrich Quanzhou’s deep culture.”[433] Other speakers at the ceremonies highlighted this theme. Xu Xuming, assistant head of the municipal propaganda department, similarly exhorted students and attendees to “read Ba Jin’s works, study how Ba Jin acted as a human being, study Ba Jin’s ‘speaking of the truth,’ and his spirit of ‘selflessness.”[434] Festival organizers and participants at the Ba Jin Culture Festival clearly saw Ba Jin Spirit as a way to exemplify the anarchist author’s life as a lesson in civics, all while minimizing his anarchist beliefs. The discussion of his spirit centers around the man’s morality, and no mention of the relationship of that spirit to his anarchist convictions of ending social, class, and gender oppression is to be found. Liming and Quanzhou have utilized Ba Jin’s spirit as a cultural symbol to produce a sanitized moral paragon through which to mold the youths that Ba Jin often made the center of his work, but not necessarily for the same goals.
One of the more blatant ways in which the festival used its commemoration of Ba Jin’s spirit to influence youth and students is various essay and poster contests. Some of these readings were academic and ceremonial, such as book giving ceremonies. One particular essay contest asked students to write on themes related to Ba Jin Spirit and to reflect on how Ba Jin and his spirit shaped their lives. School officials entitled this essay and poster contest *Wo de Lida meng*, “My Liming Dream,” and quite obviously extended Xi Jinping’s challenge for Chinese to name their own “Chinese Dream.”[435] The contest’s attempt to merge Ba Jin’s spirit, with its subtly overlooked anarchism, with a national ideological campaign by the CCP demonstrates how Ba Jin’s complex identity has been molded to meet both local and nation-wide didactic goals. The anarchism that was so essential to Ba Jin’s identity has been tamed and made safe for consumption. Because the festival smooths over his radical past, Ba Jin’s very figure has become nothing more than a kindly old *yeye* 爷爷, or grandfather, whose example everyone should follow.
At Liming, grandfather Ba Jin’s legacy did not just lie in his spirit, but also in the material culture that he has left behind. The Ba Jin Culture Festival celebrated these material traces as Ba Jin Culture. Ba Jin Culture refers to the books, journals, letters, jottings, and personal artifacts Ba Jin donated to Liming Vocational’s library after 1984. In total, the university has cataloged seven thousand and seventy-three individual books, journals, letters, and other pieces of written material received from Ba Jin in addition to hundreds of non-literary artifacts and photographs. From the late 1980s and early 1990s, Liming has often held exhibitions of its Ba Jin collections. In fact, the university’s Ba Jin Research Center houses a permanent display of Ba Jin material. For the duration of the Culture Festival’s four-year existence though, the display of Ba Jin artifacts took on a more important role. Such displays serve a larger purpose to legitimate and bolster the school, and by extension, the city’s claim to Ba Jin. Further, the display of specifically literary artifacts explicitly defines Ba Jin’s relationship to Liming and Quanzhou as one based in his literary representations.
The Ba Jin Culture Festival’s displays of its treasure trove of Ba Jin’s donated materials, writings and artifacts, provided a particular physical representation of Ba Jin’s literary link to Quanzhou and Liming. They were solid manifestations of those essays and brief chapters that Ba Jin wrote in recognition of his time in the area. They gave a nostalgic meaning to the physical space of the city. The buildings, houses, gardens, and villages that Ba Jin described were imbued with special meaning. They became symbols of what Ba Jin wrote—his characters, his imagery, his Quanzhou. Now, Ba Jin’s vision of Quanzhou, as contained in his novels, *Lightning* and Autumn *in Spring* as well as his essays, “Dream of the South” and “Black Earth”, rested on the city and Liming Advanced Middle School’s hosting of a strong anarchist movement. He wrote of radical anarchist youth struggling for the revolution. He reached out, touched faith, and wrote of “our own [personal] Jesus,” his anarchist friend, Ye Feiying 叶非英 , who taught at Liming Advanced Middle School.[436] Unfortunately, Ba Jin’s written experiences of Liming and Quanzhou’s anarchist movement do not appear in the Ba Jin Culture Festival’s exhibition of Ba Jin Culture. The festival’s exhibition of an embodied Ba Jin Culture reduced these visions to the material artifacts that the university’s library owns. If any sense of the past is evoked, it was that Ba Jin was here. He stayed in our buildings and he ate at our restaurants. He walked on our streets and rested under our trees. And here, in this collection of Ba Jin’s writings and possessions, these memories of Ba Jin lay. In the end, Ba Jin Culture, as espoused by the Ba Jin Culture Festival was another *wenhua pinpai*, a cultural trademark that “deepens [Liming] and Quanzhou’s multiplicity of culture.”[437]
Indeed, Ba Jin as *wenhua pinpai* is something the school actively promotes. Further, they have done so beyond the confines of the cultural festival. The school has recently upgraded the reading room that contains and triumphantly displays Ba Jin’s donated materials.[438] It holds conferences and events dedicated to research into Ba Jin’s life and writings, publishes periodicals and articles on Ba Jin, and has a Ba Jin research center through which these activities are coordinated.[439] With Ba Jin as an example, Liming Vocational University has even published an analysis of how campuses can utilize associated cultural properties as means to promote academic and public campaigns in and outside of school.[440] Hence, this occlusion of Ba Jin’s lived experiences at Liming confirms and strengthens the narrative the university has already established for itself regarding the author’s connection.
The *pinpai* of Ba Jin Spirit and Ba Jin Culture perhaps found a final illumination as Ba Jin Brand in the service of Quanzhou’s status as *Dongya wenhua zhi du*, or “East Asian Cultural City”, awarded in 2013. The title of “East Asian Cultural City” is a joint effort between China, Korea, and Japan to foster “‘East Asian identity, cultural exchange, and mutual appreciation.’”[441] The marshaling of a Ba Jin Brand for this title represents what historian Elizabeth Perry has termed cultural patronage, that is, the deployment by government and party of bureaucratic resources to appropriate revolutionary legacies in support of official cultural, political, and didactic goals.[442] In this case, through the resources of the school and city, the Ba Jin Culture Festival showcases and teaches Quanzhou’s status as tourist attraction and culturally flourishing modern city. Ba Jin helps Quanzhou achieve that status through his fame, not as an anarchist, but as the humanist author whose writings immortalized Quanzhou in some of the most famous works of modern Chinese fiction. Official dictates commodify the spirit and culture of Ba Jin’s life for the city’s own claims to culture and modernity. The festival offers a didactic and material message to promote an official vision of a modern Quanzhou, and this mission permeates the entirety of the festival.
Promoting the title of “East Asian Cultural City” played an important role in the Ba Jin Culture Festival’s proceedings. The 2013 culture festival featured a “‘East Asian Cultural City’ Discussion Meeting” to examine how to utilize Ba Jin’s *pinpai*, in promotion of the city. Official speakers at that year’s opening ceremonies repeatedly emphasized the importance of Ba Jin Spirit and Culture to the development of the brand of “East Asian Cultural City” as well. Throughout the festival’s existence, organizers used a special “Ba Jin and Quanzhou” picture exhibition to further highlight the significance of both Ba Jin’s time in Quanzhou and how his figure aided the campaign for “East Asian Cultural City.” The exhibition displayed pictures of Ba Jin, his friends, and scenes from Quanzhou in the 1930s. As the festival intended, honoring this relationship engenders a sense of civic, official, and academic pride. Press releases described it as “one of Quanzhou’s cultural sites.”[443] Zheng Jinshu, head secretary of Liming Vocational’s board, emphasized that Liming and Quanzhou’s relationship with Ba Jin has helped the city achieve a level of cultural capital on par with Beijing and Shanghai. He further stated, “Ba Jin’s unbreakable bond with Quanzhou...this enriches the connotations of ‘East Asian Cultural City,’ and is very advantageous.”[444] It is these advantages of Ba Jin that preclude any examinations of his or Quanzhou’s anarchist past, for they simply do not meet the needs of an “East Asian Cultural City.”
The Ba Jin Culture Festival, Ba Jin Spirit, Ba Jin Culture, and the Ba Jin Brand of Quanzhou’s title of “East Asian Cultural City” all play into larger issues of how schools and cultural organizations teach history to students and the public in China today. Just as school administrators have encouraged Liming students to incorporate Ba Jin into their “Liming Dreams,” so too have bureaucrats incorporated the Ba Jin Culture Festival and Quanzhou’s title of “East Asian Cultural City” into the *Zhongguo meng* 中国梦, the Chinese Dream. Li Qitian, party secretary at the university, proudly proclaimed at the 2013 opening ceremonies that “in regards to advancing and carrying forward the spirit of people’s author Ba Jin, and developing Quanzhou’s distinctive bearing through the ‘East Asian Cultural City’, [these] possess a positive and forward looking use in achieving that beautiful Chinese Dream.”[445] Here, it is plain to see that Ba Jin, Liming, and Quanzhou’s stories provided weight to nebulous issues of partyfacilitated discussion of national identity. The festival was not to celebrate the entangled history of Ba Jin, Liming, and Quanzhou’s complex anarchist and radical pasts, it is to celebrate how they can be used as cultural capital and trademarks in touristic and nationalist agendas.
Liming and Quanzhou’s Ba Jin Culture Festival reflect both the importance of historical memory and the pathway of its use, in this case by the educative purposes to which it put its cultural patronage of Ba Jin’s legacy. As public history, it distilled the complexities of Ba Jin and China’s twentieth-century experience into a single appropriate and didactic story of Ba Jin Spirit, Ba Jin Culture, and Ba Jin Brand. It memorialized Ba Jin’s cultural and moral legacy while taming his and the school’s historical anarchist identities, thus creating a narrative of Ba Jin as an exemplar of humanist warmth and virtue and Liming as a site that distills those qualities. The Ba Jin Culture Festival wove together Ba Jin, Liming Vocational University, and Quanzhou’s memories as specific cultural, social, and historical sites and presented them to the public as curriculum to be learned and then promoted. However, this educational mission of the Ba Jin Culture Festival to coalesce Ba Jin, Liming, and Quanzhou’s historical complexities into a coherent exposition of modernity and culture only reinforces the importance of their hidden anarchist pasts.
*** Liming and Pingmin a la the Academicians: Ba Jin Emergent
Despite the narrative that was displayed in the Ba Jin Cultural Festival, the history of Liming, Quanzhou, and those involved is radical and anarchist. Liming Vocational University was originally Liming Advanced Middle School, a school that existed in Quanzhou from 1929 to 1934. Liming Advanced Middle School and its sister institution, Pingmin Middle School were politically progressive institutions that were to become bastions of anarchism and radical education. Anarchist intellectuals, artists, and educators from across China—and even Korea and Japan—flocked to Liming and Pingmin to participate in its mission. Further, they were drawn to Quanzhou, which was itself a stronghold of anarchism and its particular brand of liberatory ideology.[446] This vibrant and fertile atmosphere attracted the young author and anarchist, Ba Jin, who would strike up a complex and deeply felt relationship with the area. It further attracted the attention of other anarchists, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, who saw in Liming, Pingmin, and Quanzhou, a bastion for their activities. Together, these schools and the city became known as important bases of Chinese anarchist activity after the bloody 1927 GMDled purges of leftwing activity.
Over time, however, Ba Jin came to be one of the main narrative threads through which historians came to tell the story of Liming and Quanzhou, and his presence from three trips he took to Quanzhou in the early 1930s has come to define Liming and Pingmin’s trajectory. Specifically, Ba Jin’s time in Quanzhou has transformed the histories of the two schools into the concern of literary study, with the current Liming Vocational University, capitalizing on Ba Jin’s association through efforts to promote itself as a center of Ba Jin Culture 巴金文化.[447] Yet, the school and city’s anarchist pasts transcend Ba Jin’s figure and encompass an incredibly complex history that weaves together the region’s historic overseas networks in the Nanyang region, its influence in early Chinese revolutionary movements, and the complex place of left-wing radicals within the GMD. Recent scholarship, especially, has shown that Liming, Pingmin, and Quanzhou’s anarchist story is richly transnational. Even the continued focus on Ba Jin’s relationship to the schools and city reveals an increasing awareness of the Asian dimension of the international anarchist networks that suffused the area. Moreover, not treating Ba Jin, both his career and fame, as a historical eventuality allows Liming, Pingmin, their anarchist teachers, and the hundreds of students involved to speak more freely.
**** **Fujian, Quanzhou, and China’s Transnational Revolutions**
Liming and Pingmin’s anarchist histories did not exist in a vacuum. In the early twentieth century, southern Fujian developed a strong revolutionary tradition that weaved together its longstanding international ties. Overseas Chinese, particularly overseas Fujianese, had played an important role in the lead up to the 1911 Xinhai Revolution 辛亥革命. They provided funds for arms, logistics, and communications for Sun Yat-sen’s Tongmenghui 同盟会. They continued to support Sun and the Tongmenghui/GMD after the revolution and worked with factions aligned with him in fighting against Yuan Shikai’s Beiyang forces. In the 1910s and 1920s, overseas Fujianese were central to the province’s efforts to drive out Li Houji 李厚基 (1869–1942), a warlord who gained prominence under Yuan’s efforts to stamp out Sun’s support. Overseas groups funded their own armies and sought to establish political and social institutions, like training centers, newspapers, and schools.[448] In this volatile atmosphere, some members of the overseas communities sought solutions in anarchism and other radical ideologies.
Anarchism became associated with Fujian in early 1918 with the arrival of Chen Jiongming 陈炯明 (1878–1933) and his Guangdong Army to Aid Fujian 援闽粤军 in Zhangzhou. During his forces’ occupation of Zhangzhou and southern Fujian, Chen supported and nurtured anarchist efforts to revolutionize society there.[449] He brought along Liu Shixin 刘石心 and Liang Bingxian 梁冰弦, two anarchists closely associated with Shifu’s group.[450] Together, Liu and Li, along with other anarchists assembled by Chen began publishing an anarchist paper, *Minxing* 《闽星》, and organizing other anarchist propaganda work. According to Liu’s later recollections, their propaganda work on anarchism and local autonomy was so successful that some surrounding villages even began to agitate against Chen, chanting that “Zhangzhou is for the people of Zhangzhou! Chen Jiongming go back to Guangdong!”[451] After a while, Liu, Li, and the anarchists seemed to outlive their welcome in the province. They and Chen left southern Fujian in 1920, however, anarchist groups continued to flourish.
Over the next few years, local Fujian anarchist groups prospered and expanded. New papers were founded, among which was Xiamen’s *Jiangsheng bao* 《江声报》, which began publishing in 1924. The *Jiangsheng* *bao* was an amalgamation of older papers, one of which *Minzhong ribao* 《民钟日报》, was an anarchist-tinged paper that had strong overseas connections. Another important feature of the *Jiangsheng bao*, and of the anarchist situation of Fujian in general, was connections with local GMD apparatchiks. In the *Jiangsheng bao*’s case, Xu Zhuoran and his protégé, Qin Wangshan, both southern Fujian natives, provided funds and backing.[452] They turned to Liang Bingxian for editorship and the paper established itself with solid anarchist credentials, and it soon proved to be the paper of record regarding anarchist activities in the region.[453]
In addition to the paper, Xu and Qin involved themselves in a number of projects that aimed to consolidate their social, economic, and political visions for southern Fujian. These projects included establishing the Autonomous Fujian Army and various propaganda training schools to attempt to tear the province away from Li Houji’s control. By 1922, forces loyal to Sun managed to drive Li Houji from power, but chaos continued to reign as no clear provincial leadership emerged.[454] In 1924, Xu attended the First National GMD Congress and soon after, Qin was appointed to a position overseeing Pujiang County 浦江县, which neighbored Quanzhou. During this time, the two organized a propaganda training center through which they could build up a corps of administrators allied to their cause. Qin, who already counted himself an anarchist, directed the center’s curriculum to include readings in anarchist texts and principles in the hopes of training up Fujian’s youths as anarchists.[455] Qin also attempted to organize and train peasants into *mintuan* 民团, or people’s brigades. These *mintuan* would be organized for the protection of villages against bandits as well as a force for carrying out social revolution. These were both deemed crucial projects for the establishment of Quanzhou as an anarchist base.[456] The center and *mintuan* movement did not last long as fighting in the area and political shuffling took away both the physical and social space for their existence. However, a number of the center’s trainees and *mintuan* organizers did go on to work with Xu and Qin in administering the area around Quanzhou and Pujiang and helping with Liming and Pingmin.
Liang Piyun emerged from the propaganda training school as perhaps Xu and Qin’s most important collaborator. He took part in the 1928 discussions that lead to the founding of Liming. These discussions involved Xu, Qin, Liang, and four other prominent local leaders. Together, taking their cue from a 1927 visit by Cai Yuanpei in support of establishing modern education initiatives, the group sought to create an anarchist institution that would combine both classroom and labor learning.[457] They further decided that Liming would be an advanced middle school/high school as there were few in the immediate vicinity. Funds for the school would come from sales of stock they owned in the Quan’an Automobile Company 泉安汽车公司. The money would be used buy land and initiate construction for the campus. With the logistics taken care of, they set about recruiting a preparatory class for the school’s official opening in 1929.
At this point, it is important to note that though Qin, Liang, and others were committed to anarchist education, and that they enjoyed a degree of protection from GMD right-wing reaction, they still faced difficulties in launching and operating Liming as an anarchist school.[458] In the initial discussions to set up Liming, outside of Liang, Qin, and Xu, those involved were not too keen to launch Liming as an explicitly anarchist school. It took Xu’s cajoling to ensure the school’s anarchist identity would be maintained.[459] Xu’s protection was of great importance for the anarchists. Qin, in a later interview, admitted that from 1926 to 1928, his GMD membership was suspended. In 1926, he had written a telegram that criticized central leadership’s proposed decision to attack Feng Yuxiang 冯玉祥 (1882–1948). Qin was spared additional punishment as Xu vouched for his protégé, letting the investigator assigned to Qin’s case know that “This anarchism business is something far off in the future. Right now, Qin does the things that a good GMD operative is supposed to do. The populace knows whether he is doing the right thing.”[460] Yet, despite Xu’s protection, the school still had to deal with recalcitrant administrators in the education department who deemed Liming’s proposed inclusion of labor learning un-educational and thwarted construction plans for the campus.[461] Soon after, Xu was assassinated and Qin Wangshan’s immediate involvement in the school lessened as he was busy with official work, raising funds overseas and further, he had a sour relationship with Chen Guohui 陈国辉 (1898–1932), the leading militarist in the region.[462] For most of its existence, Liming had to rely on its staff and the activities of its radicalized students for protection. However, when the school was shut down in 1934, in the aftermath of the Fujian Rebellion 闽变, it was in response to student provocations against local officials.[463]
Liming’s sister school, Pingmin Middle School was established through an existing school of the same name. In 1930, numerous teachers left Liming in what appeared to be a split over how radical the school’s direction should be. Many of them transferred to Pingmin, which had just come under the headmastership of Ye Feiying, whom Ba Jin had described as their anarchist Jesus.[464] After Ye took over duties at Pingmin, the school’s reputation changed. It became known as perhaps even more radical than Liming. Its students took part in a variety of propaganda activities, and after the school closures in 1934, Ye and others continued on with their school under a different name, Minsheng Agricultural School 民生农校. Under this new name, Ye and other anarchists carried on with their radical education work into the war with Japan.[465] It was probably the continued activity at Minsheng to which reports on anarchist undertakings in China that appeared in *MAN!* in the late 1930s obliquely referred. Ba Jin and Lu Jianbo’s later references after the war to anarchists active in Fujian also most likely meant Minsheng Agricultural Middle School.[466] While records on these schools remain sparse, these shared recollections of anarchist activity should not be dismissed as the ways in which anarchists in China presented their actions, as this and these other chapters have and will show, often were subject to layers of historical re-narrativization.[467]
One other important factor must be discussed in the brief 1929–1934 existence of Liming and Pingmin: their relationship to the Labor University and Lida Academy in Shanghai. These four schools did not just share an affinity for anarchist education. They shared both teachers and students. Figures like Wu Kegang worked at the Labor University as well as Liming and Pingmin. In fact, much of the faculty in Quanzhou shuttled between there and Shanghai depending on the situation at each school. Part of this had to do with the given political and social restraints in the respective locales.[468] Quanzhou’s status as a relative safe haven for anarchist activity, especially after the 1927 GMD purge, attracted anarchists from Shanghai and elsewhere. Xu Zhuoran’s murder in 1930, while taking way a major protective figure within the GMD, did not do too much to dissuade anarchists viewing Liming and Pingmin as attractive opportunities. In Shanghai, the 1932 Japanese bombing and attack destroyed much of the Labor University’s campus, but Lida Academy escaped the flames and continued its ties with Liming and Pingmin. In fact, based on the available evidence, it would seem that the schools and Quanzhou and Lida enjoyed a closer relationship than with the Labor University.[469] Nevertheless, the links between the three major anarchist educational institutions demonstrates another way through which anarchists in China traversed various networks and how even as any large scale political and social influence faded, they managed to continue with activities the felt meaningful.
**** **Liming, Pingmin, Wenshi ziliao, and the Problem of Approach**
In the histories of Liming and Pingmin as they transpired, Ba Jin remains largely absent save for his three visits to Quanzhou in the early 1930s. Yet, within the larger historical narrative, Ba Jin’s visits take on an outsized importance. Much of this has to do with who has been doing the writing on Liming and Pingmin, and the sources historians and scholars use to frame their stories. Ba Jin’s prevalence in a story of anarchist education in coastal Fujian is largely the result of a coterie of Japanese and Chinese Ba Jin scholars and the development of Ba Jin’s growing celebrity image.[470] Moreover, Ba Jin’s use of colleagues and Quanzhou as setting and inspiration for some of his important stories and novels has shaped scholarly production in a vein that skews towards literary history. These two key elements have done much to shape how Liming, Pingmin, and Quanzhou’s anarchist pasts have been interpreted.
As sites within larger biographies of Ba Jin, Quanzhou, Liming, and Pingmin have occupied a place of transition within his life. Influential Ba Jin scholars such as Chen Sihe, Susumu Higuchi, and Sakai Hirobumi, all working in the late 1970s and 1980s have placed Quanzhou and Fujian as a moment when Ba Jin the anarchist gives way to Ba Jin the writer and idealist.[471] In all three cases, anarchism serves Ba Jin as a form of idealism and humanistic drive that fills his written work. Liming and Pingmin, and the friends he met there, served as catalysts to reinforce that drive in a moment of doubt.[472] In a paraphrase of his experiences there, Ba Jin reminisced on how at his time in Quanzhou, he came away inspired by the heated and passionate exchanges about how to better the world he had with his friends there. The dedication he saw in their activities refilled a heart that had become heavy with disappointment. These sentiments, in the guise of different characters and settings, summarize how he viewed his time in Quanzhou.[473] This too is how Quanzhou and Ba Jin’s story is constructed. Susumu frames the story in the context of Ba Jin’s later exchange with Xu Maoyong and Ba Jin’s thoughts on who the true anarchists are and what they mean to China’s ongoing revolutions.[474] Chen Sihe frames his southern journeys as part of his quest to solidify the meaning of his own idealism.[475] Sakai Hirobumi takes a similar approach as well, looking to use Liming and Pingmin as a means to answer questions regarding what anarchism meant to Ba Jin. More importantly, in his efforts, Sakai looks to see what anarchism meant in China more generally.[476] Together, these three approaches are focused on what anarchism meant in terms of thought, emotion, and ideology and were less concerned with the practical matters of what anarchists were actually doing in their daily existence and efforts.
In the cases of Chen, Susumu, and Sakai’s work on Quanzhou, each relied mainly on Ba Jin’s writings, both his published stories and memoirs, and in some cases, letter he wrote to friends. Aside from these Ba Jin-centric materials, another major source has been written and oral testimonies collected decades after the events in anthologies of historical materials known as *wenshi ziliao* 文史资料.[477] The *wenshi ziliao* in which these testimonies appear were collected over two decades, from the 1960s through the 1980s. Our concern lies with the materials collected in the 1980s as the main collections on Quanzhou, Liming, and Pingmin are derived from them. Many of these materials appeared in speeches and reminisces in celebration of Liang Piyun’s re-founding of Liming first as Liming Academy 黎明学园 and then Liming Vocational University 黎明职业大学.[478] Other materials collected in *wenshi ziliao* were used in scholarly articles on Ba Jin and Fujian that were later collected in an anthology, *Ba Jin yu Quanzhou* 《巴金与泉州》, which was published in 1994.[479] Together, these *wenshi ziliao* paint a rich portrait of the personal experiences of anarchists in Fujian. But, if only read in light of getting at the place of anarchism within Ba Jin’s life, they will merely reproduce tired narratives and categories.
In a series of 2006 articles, Gu Yeping, a historian associated with Fujian Normal University, highlighted how with few exceptions, scholarly explorations of Fujian’s anarchist activities have relied on memoirs and recollections collected in *wenshi ziliao*. Through these sources, scholars have been able to recreate an image of what happened at Liming and Pingmin. However, these sources have prevented scholars from glimpsing the more day to day affairs of what happened and what kinds of activities in which students did partake. To help provide a fuller picture, Gu has turned to then contemporary issues of *Jiangsheng bao*, Xu Zhuoran’s paper. With these sources, Gu has been able to paint a fuller picture of the schools’ radicalism that was only hinted at in the recollections and commemorations.[480] However, again, Gu’s scholarship has focused on the figure of Ba Jin and how Liming, Pingmin, and Quanzhou serve as backdrops for Ba Jin’s literary and personal development. To make the best use of the sources Gu brings to light and the testimonies collected in the various *wenshi ziliao* first requires historians to, at the very least, read with Ba Jin’s figure as a nodal point in the background not as a teleology. That *wenshi ziliao* themselves produce sometimes conflicting accounts is not in and of itself problematic, especially if historians read these accounts within the light of their production and framing, which in the case of the materials collected on Liming and Pingmin were produced as texts designed to nostalgically celebrate the schools. Combined with the details in the reports of the *Jiangsheng bao* and other papers, we may see a clearer picture of what anarchist practice looked like in Quanzhou, Liming, and Pingmin and possibly possess a sharper lens through which to approach the inner lives of the anarchists who brought the city and these institutions to life.
**** **Korean Anarchists and Ba Jin**
Strangely enough though, the transnational fixation on Ba Jin’s time in Quanzhou has helped to reveal further transnational dimensions of Quanzhou’s anarchist scene. Korean and Japanese anarchists, through connections with the Labor University and Lida Academy, were influential members of Liming and Pingmin’s faculties. Further, even before Liming and Pingmin, Korean anarchists were active participants in Quanzhou’s anarchist circles. Yi Jeonggyu, Yu Seo, Yi Gihwan, Yi Eulgyu, Yu Jicheong were all influential Korean anarchists involved in Qin Wangshan’s earlier efforts to organize peasant *mintuan*.[481] Once Liming opened in 1929, numerous Korean anarchists served as instructors. Among them were Yu Ja-myeong, Yu Seo, Heo Yeolchu, Jang Sumin, and Kim Gyuseon.[482] The presence of Korean anarchists in China was longstanding and throughout the 1920s, they and their Chinese counterparts engaged in numerous collaborative ventures.[483] Their presence in Quanzhou was par for the course, but Quanzhou itself was noteworthy for its scale as it was one of the largest gathering points for anarchists in China outside the metropolitan areas of Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Beijing.
Liming and Pingmin’s faculties were truly transnational Asian affairs. Sources even suggest that some of the logistics of the 1928 establishment of the Eastern Anarchist Federation took place in Quanzhou in the interim between the efforts to organize *mintuan* and found Liming. Additionally, there were a number of Japanese anarchists who also taught at Liming.[484] Nonetheless, this incredibly rich transnational network is often reduced to the friendship Ba Jin later developed with Yu Ja-myeong later in the 1930s. Yu was to serve as inspiration for characters depicted in “Fa de gushi” 《发的故事》, which was about the ardent dedication and patriotism of Korean radicals.[485] The importance of Liming, Pingmin, and Quanzhou as a site of transnational Asian anarchist radicalism cannot be overemphasized. Yet, to truly understand the impact of Liming and Pingmin, Ba Jin’s place within these narratives needs to be re-examined so that the rich networks that brought these two schools together may be more fully understood.
*** Liang Piyun, Radical Education, and Diasporic Chinese Ventures
Ba Jin’s dominance of the narratives surrounding the Quanzhou anarchists overshadow another, perhaps more salient narrative, that of Liang Piyun. As mentioned previously, Liang, a southern Fujian native, came up through Qin Wangshan’s propaganda training center in the mid1920s. He also attended Shanghai University and made friends with anarchists, communists, and other radicals during his time there.[486] A committed anarchist, Liang participated in protest and propaganda activities, taking part in the 1927 general strike in Shanghai. His commitment to radical causes earned him the trust of Qin and others and he was selected to head Liming Advanced Middle School when he was just 21 years old in 1929.[487] Liang served as Liming’s headmaster into 1930, at which point he left for Japan for further studies at Waseda University. His departure from Liming came out of the same split between different radical factions among the teachers that led to some moving to Pingmin with Ye Feiying. Chen Sihe has interpreted this as Liang growing somewhat impatient with the more romantic idealism of some of his cohort. In Chen’s estimation, Liang’s anarchist practice was not driven by a need for ideological purity, but out of a sense of efficacy and instrumentality. According to Chen, this focus on efficacy transformed his anarchist commitments into broader educational and ethical concerns. Such a transformation in belief is certainly not unprecedented—Ba Jin, after all, changed in his commitment to anarchism—but it does not alter the original intentions and animating practices that shaped Liming and Pingmin’s original incarnations.[488] In any case, fifty years later, Liang would return to Quanzhou to re-establish Liming in 1980.
In between Liming’s shuttering and re-opening, Liang traveled long-established circuits throughout the Nanyang region. He continued in education, building a reputation as a progressive and radical educator. After the war with Japan broke out in 1937, Liang headed to some of the most well-known overseas Chinese schools: Su Tong Middle School 棉兰苏东中学 in Medan, Sumatra and Chung Hwa Secondary School 吉隆坡中华中学 in Kuala Lumpur. At the tail end of the war, he helped found and head up Haijiang Training School 海疆专科学校 in Quanzhou, which was established by the GMD to provide education for overseas Chinese from across the Nanyang region and to integrate these coastal areas and attendant networks into a coherent vision of identity.[489] After leaving Haijiang, Liang returned to Indonesia, working as an editor with a local, pro-PRC newspaper, the *Huoju bao* 《火炬报》. In the wake of rising anti-Chinese violence and Suharto’s 1965 coup, he left for the People’s Republic before finding refuge in Macao. There he started the Aomen Guiqiao Zonghui 澳门归侨总会 and organized a number of educational ventures and resettlement programs for overseas Chinese fleeing persecution brought on by anti-CCP sentiments across the Nanyang.[490] but he never left his calling as an educator behind, as evident in his efforts to rebuild Liming as Liming Vocational University in the 1980s and 90s.
For his role in founding and leading the various incarnations of Liming, Liang earned his place as the school’s figurehead. In the 1980s, he was the one who marked important occasions with speeches, and it was his anniversaries that were celebrated. This is not to say that Ba Jin was ignored by the literature produced by the school’s alumni associations. Rather, there is a distinct difference in how and to whom Ba Jin’s narrative is presented versus how and to whom Liang Piyun’s narrative is presented.[491] Even though Liang did not receive the honors of a Culture Festival, the display of his collected writings and materials is deemed as just as important to the school as that of Ba Jin’s.[492] If Ba Jin was a *wenhua pinpai* to be capitalized and used in promoting the school to a wider audience, Liang Piyun was an educational idealist who represented the school’s vision of itself.
In a 1992 edition of *Liming zhiye daxue xuebao* that was dedicated to Liang Piyun, numerous articles outline Liang’s educational vision as the Liming’s greatest contribution. Numerous articles outlined the progressive, radical, and humanistic approach he championed. One common refrain for the essays collected in this issue was to point to a couplet 二联 Liang wrote in celebration of the school’s 1929 founding. It read in part, “Here is certainly not a school; the universe is truly the school. Further, we have no family; this school is the masses’ family.”[493] Additionally, Liang’s progressive and humanistic approach drew comparisons to Cai Yuanpei’s, but more importantly, writers in the journal directly connected his educational philosophy to Lida Academy and the ideas of Kuang Husheng, the Shanghai-based anarchist educator. Here again, this connection came through Liang’s time at Shanghai University and his association with anarchist and radical educators who worked with Kuang, and it also came with the sharing of teachers between Lida, Liming, and Pingmin.[494] Liming and Lida’s anarchist backgrounds cannot be overstated, especially as both schools incorporated physical learning and emphasized the ‘common-alization’ of education that had a special place within anarchist education theory.[495]
However, within all the essays in the 1992 special issue, Liang’s overseas connections stands out as the most important part of his educational philosophy. This transnationalism was stripped of any previous anarchist content from Liang’s experience at Liming and Pingmin, and instead coded as radical and patriotic. From his experience overseas in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Macao, Liang came to view education in Fujian and the coastal areas that served as ancestral homes for the overseas communities as situated within a specific transnational context within a larger Sinophone world. Termed *haijiang jiaoyu* 海疆教育 after the school Liang ran in Quanzhou in the immediate post-war period, it was neither a borderlands education designed to assimilate minorities, nor was it the type of education designed to train up overseas Chinese for work in commercial ventures in the Nanyang.[496]
As presented in *Liming zhiye daxue xuebao,* Liang’s *haijiang jiaoyu* not only aimed to bring together the experiences of overseas Chinese communities in the Nanyang within a broader consciousness of their Sinophone roots, it also sought to instill within overseas Chinese a sense of understanding and appreciating ‘the others’ they encountered in the Nanyang’s multicultural, yet colonized environment. To this end, in addition to the technical skills needed to survive in the commercial worlds of southeast Asia, Liang’s *haijiang jiaoyu* emphasized cultural and historical studies of the Nanyang region. Language played an important role in this as students were expected to study both the languages of the colonizing European powers (English, Dutch, French, and Japanese) as well as the languages of the colonized (Bhasa Malay, Siamese, Burmese, Vietnamese, Lao, Khmer, and Korean).[497] The undercurrent with Liang’s engagement with transnationalism, multiculturalism, and colonialism addressed the earlier anarchist commitments of Liming and Pingmin in tandem with the more explicit socio-historical experiences of the overseas Chinese communities. Liang did not frame his educational theories as anarchist, and they certainly were not labeled as such in Liming Vocational’s publications, but its emphasis on creating bonds across boundaries was very much a part of the anarchist experience in China.
As the PRC underwent a series of economic reforms beginning in the 1980s, the transnational implications of Liang’s educational philosophy could hardly be more evident. Loosened economic, cultural, and travel restrictions enabled increased connectivity with the world at large, but this increased connectivity required a heightened awareness of identity. The essayists in the 1992 issue on Liang Piyun’s legacy were very quick to identify this issue of rootedness, identity, and patriotism. Liang’s *haijiang* *jiaoyu* was repeatedly praised for its commitment to instilling patriotic values within overseas Chinese communities (and its implications for the patriotism for those traveled out from the mainland).[498] This rhetoric of patriotism through transnational educational philosophy must be read with attention to both the narratives of Liang as presented in the school’s official publications and the less mediated voices that appear in the bulletins published by Liming and Pingmin’s alumni associations. Though while Liang’s anarchist practice may have been subsumed under the historical experiences he had after leaving Liming, the foundation anarchist thought brought to his early activities should not be ignored.
Today, this importance of the roots that Liming and Pingmin’s anarchist practices provide to Liang’s later *haijiang* *jiaoyu* is all the more apparent as its transnationalism and sensitivity towards ‘the other’ is again harnessed towards developmental and political goals at the local and national level. Again, this appropriation comes from Liming Vocational University itself. In an article appearing last year, Liang’s *haijiang jiaoyu* was discussed as a means by which the spiritual ideals and material goods intended to travel along the maritime portion of the *Yi dai yi lu* 一带一路 [One Belt One Road] initiative may be spread. Liang’s pedagogical framework will also provide a means to further take advantage of Quanzhou’s history and longstanding transnational ties. It, after all was and, now again, is a terminus along the Silk Road.[499] Further, using Liang’s maxim that “only when peoples [民族] coordinate with one another to stride forward, share each other’s strength to make progress will they arrive at unity among the peoples”, the author argues that Liming possesses the particular history, outlook, and resources (handed down by Liang) to make a significant contribution to the internationalist visions of the Belt and Road Initiative.[500] All at once, this article marshals an outlook that is inextricably linked with the school’s prior anarchist past as both marketing tool for Liming Vocational’s promotion and slogan for a nationalist project. It is a prime example of the school patronizing its own and Liang Piyun’s past for its own purposes. In all truth, the way Liming utilizes Liang’s heritage differs little than how it massages Ba Jin’s relationship with the school. However, Liang’s position and malleability offers something deeper and more resonant. Liang’s anarchist past may be effaced, but it speaks more to the multiplicity of transnational identities in Quanzhou.
*** Conclusions
Liming and Pingmin’s place within the history of Chinese anarchist movements accentuates both their transnational existence and how anarchist practices have been received into various contemporary narratives of the Chinese nation-state. The transnational activity of Chinese anarchists took numerous forms, whether through correspondence networks or through individuals travelling through overseas circuits. The schools also represent the ways by which anarchist histories have been folded into contemporary narratives. Liming and Pingmin’s anarchist pasts are now the sites of youthful educationalists who sought to transform and extend schooling to the masses. They are also the cultural patronage sites of famous figures like Ba Jin who represent cultural capital more so than radical and disruptive pasts. In this sense, anarchist thought and practice have been reduced to harmless elements of culture that serve national and local interests.[501] In the scope of a national narrative of modernization and revolution, Quanzhou, Liming, and Pingmin represent the efforts of impassioned and committed youths tirelessly working to educate the masses. Within the local Quanzhou scene, the figure of Liang Piyun and his peripatetic career as an educator represents both the overseas identity of the Fujianese and the place within China’s long revolutionary process. In both cases, the anarchist identities of the schools, teachers and students have been stripped away in favor of youthful idealism, but they also offer ways to accentuate the transnational ties that are an indelible part of the region.
Liming and Pingmin were part of a larger, and for the most part, unaffiliated network of schools and corps of educators who sought to utilize education in the transformation of China (Here it bears reminding that Liming and Pingmin were part of a larger network of anarchistinfluenced schools that included Lida Academy). These educational projects took on a variety of forms, from the elite universities in Beijing and Shanghai to rural enlightenment movements such as those sponsored by James Yen and Liang Shuming.[502] The multiplicity of ideologies that animated these different projects is breathtaking, but one cannot forget the place that anarchist thought and practice forged within them. Though unabashedly anarchist schools like Liming and Pingmin in Quanzhou, and the National Labor University and Lida Academy in Shanghai were few and far between, anarchism inspired teachers and administrators across the country. Figures like Geng Xuefeng, a rural cadre in Hebei, whose ideas on cooperative agricultural groupings came from his exposure to anarchist texts brought by his radical, Beijing University educated teacher represent the widespread availability of anarchist thought and practices.[503] Though anarchist education did not exist in any large scale organizational form in China, anarchist ideas on education did circulate and influence ideas on education, its popularization, and what popularization of education would mean for Chinese and the nation. Liming, Pingmin, and their role in providing education to the masses must be included in this conversation.
At the local level, Liming and Pingmin exemplify the centuries of transnational experience that shaped Fujian’s identity. The distillation of the schools’ transnational existence has been further personified through the figures of Ba Jin and Liang Piyun. Through Ba Jin’s writings and narration of the experiences of Liming and Pingmin’s youthful anarchist educators in his writings, Quanzhou is exported to the world at large. In Liang Piyun, Quanzhou has quintessential story of an overseas son made good.[504] Liang’s efforts in Fujian, Indonesia, and Macao and his service to both Fujian and its networks abroad, tell the story of an idealist whose lifetime commitment to education brought prosperity to his local communities. That this story also includes a list of famous cultural figures only adds to Liang, Liming, and Pingmin’s prestige. However, in their current forms, these narratives of transnational success occlude the anarchist practices that played an important role in the two schools’ development.[505] Anarchists were able to establish, implement, and expand anarchist activities in Fujian by utilizing already operating connections and networks. Anarchist influence within local officialdom provided political and social shelter for anarchist activities. Overseas networks in terms of exchange students from France and Japan as well as older linkages within the Nanyang region provided political, social, and economic space through which anarchists could move and operate.[506] Liming and Pingmin could never have existed as they did without the confluence of circumstances as they did in Quanzhou and Fujian.
In the end, 1934 saw the end of Liming and Pingmin, but their radical and anarchist legacies continued to shape the lives of those were there. The Minsheng Agricultural School that took over Pingmin’s grounds continued the latter’s radical curriculum of combining education and physical work. Korean participants took the lessons of Liming and Pingmin and applied them to the founding of their own schools on the Korean peninsula after the Second World War.[507] The re-establishment of Liming as Liming Vocational University in the 1980s and 90 capitalized on the way these transnational anarchist foundations overlay older Fujianese connections to the Nanyang. The anarchist background of the school may be now reduced to just youthful idealism and collaborative experiences of overseas Chinese, Japanese and Korean activists, but there is no denying the ways in which anarchist transnationals have provided the opportunities which the campus avails itself of today.
** Chapter 5 – China, Spain, and the Possibilities of Global Anti-Fascism and Anti-Japanese Resistance in the Pages of *Jingzhe*
*** One More Push
By the 1930s, Chinese anarchists appeared to be a spent force, but while sidelined in mainstream political and social movements, Chinese anarchists continued, particularly in educational efforts for the next two decades. The earlier choice of some anarchists to side with the GMD in ending the first United Front and violently purging CCP members proved to only further lessen anarchists’ already disappearing clout as a political and social movement. Soon after the split, Chiang Kai-shek eliminated the GMD left-wing and moved the party to the right. Any hopes that anarchists could influence the GMD from within were dashed.[508] With Chiang’s rise to sole prominence, anarchists lost their bet. The institutions they had established, such as the Labor University in Shanghai, were stripped of their radical agendas by GMD overseers, and many anarchists gave up the cause and receded into political nothingness. This is the narrative told in most histories. Zarrow and Dirlik end their histories of anarchism in China around 1930, leaving to their conclusions the mopping up of details and recounting the post-anarchist careers of Li Shizeng 李石曾, Ou Shengbai 欧声白, Huang Lingshuang 黄陵霜, Jing Meijiu 景梅九, and others.[509] However, as Davide Turcato has argued, the disappearance of large-scale anarchist institutions and organizations did not mean anarchists ceased to operate. Researchers merely need to follow where anarchists and anarchist printing presses moved to reveal the obscured vitality of anarchist movements and activists.[510]
As we have seen in the last chapter’s case of the Fujian anarchists at Liming Advanced Middle School 黎明高中 and Pingmin Middle School 平民中校 in Quanzhou, anarchists continued their efforts to build the conditions for a social revolution through educational institutions well into the 1930s. Yet, educational activities were only one of the ways they maintained their connections to their comrades across Asia and across the Pacific in the Americas and further east to Europe. Indeed, the schools in Quanzhou, and most certainly Lida Academy’s Agricultural Experimental School 立达学园农业教科 and the Labor University in Shanghai 上海国立劳动大学, should be seen not just as a Chinese anarchist venture, but a regional endeavor with teachers and staff coming from Korea, Japan, and as far away as France.[511] Moreover, the Quanzhou schools operated as an alternative site, a place of refuge from which anarchists could find respite from repression from Shanghai and other larger urban areas with a heavier state presence. Alongside the Quanzhou-based anarchists’ efforts to further their cause, other anarchists too looked to find refuge away from GMD power centers so as to keep up correspondence networks and begin new publishing activities.
Lu Jianbo 卢剑波 (1904–1991) represents perhaps one of the most visible figures who continued to work as an anarchist. Lu returned to Sichuan in the early 1930s, having escaped possible imprisonment and execution by the GMD, after having been marked a leftist-communist agitator. Eventually settling in and around the Chengdu area, Lu published a steady stream of periodicals, some focusing on literature, some focusing on Esperanto, but all maintaining links, thoughts, and practices with larger global anarchist communities.[512] In early 1937, as the conflict with Japan worsened and war seemed ever more likely, Lu first published *Jingzhe* 《惊蛰》(*The Awakening*), an explicitly anarchist journal that translated anarchist and radical literary texts. More importantly, it translated anarchist reportage on the Spanish Civil War to its audience and developed an anarchist critique of what would be the Chinese war effort of those first few years. *Jingzhe* ran until early 1940, but during its nearly three years of existence, it represented a not insignificant effort by anarchists to propagate their vision. Further, it brought together and articulated a global anarchist voice on the war, connected China’s conflict with Japan to a global anti-fascist front, and emphasized that the conflict should not be fought as a contest between nation-states, but as a revolution for a new society.
It is in *Jingzhe*’s efforts to draw connections between Chinese efforts against the Japanese and concurrent anti-fascist resistance across the world in Spain and elsewhere that we can understand that while there may have not been an organized anarchist movement, there were still anarchists in China committed intellectually and, or, politically to some form of anarchist activity. Older narratives have been quick to point out a ‘death’ of anarchism across the globe in the lead up to the Second World War, but scholars are increasingly finding that the absence of a significant anarchist presence did not entail an absence of anarchists.[513] *Jingzhe*’s place in this reassessment lies in it marshalling of existing Chinese links to global anarchist and anti-fascist actors, particularly those in Spain. Lu Jianbo first developed links to Spanish-speaking anarchist networks in the late 1920s, and these connections were used in obtaining, translating, and circulating anarchist news on the revolution and civil war in Spain.[514] With these connections, Lu and his cohort at *Jingzhe* were able to argue for both anarchist relevance in conceiving a popular front against Japan and China’s place in a larger global conflict. These efforts were not unprecedented as discussions of what form should Chinese resistance against the Japanese take were widespread. The global importance of China’s conflict with Japan shared space in the Chinese press with news of the civil war in Spain in the late 30s as well as reportage on other tensions in Europe that filled pages of Chinese language newspapers and magazines. China’s fighting was both local and global and despite focus on defeating the Japanese, Chinese writers and thinkers never ignored this aspect. For anarchists, the transnational, anti-imperial, and antistatist ramifications of the fighting were even clearer.
To join these widely divergent contexts, it is unavoidable that this chapter hopscotch back and forth between Chinese and global contexts. Therefore, the plan of this chapter is to first offer a brief discussion of the means of action available to Chinese anarchists in the 1930s: education, publishing, and language (namely, Esperanto). From there, the chapter endeavors to place Chinese anarchist activities in the 1930s within the global context of anti-fascist and fascist movements, then moving to Spain and the Spanish Civil War as an example and resource available through which Chinese anarchists were able to push their own ideas and attempt to engage wider communities. With these contexts established, the chapter will then sketch Lu’s anarchist background leading up to the formation of *Jingzhe* in 1937. Then, as a significant result and expression of Chinese anarchist participation in global networks, *Jingzhe* will be examined in terms of how it was put together as a publication. Utilizing Davide Turcato’s insights on the operation of transnational anarchist movements, this section hopes to tease out the possibilities of how Lu and his cohort utilized their networks to construct their own anarchist vision for *Jingzhe*, how the periodical fit within Chengdu’s publishing environment, and how both were affected by the progress of the war against Japan.[515] Finally, the chapter will end with a close reading of the anarchist themes and agendas developed within *Jingzhe*’s pages. Lu Jianbo, his comrades, and *Jingzhe* represented a vital example of the perseverance of Chinese anarchists and how they continued to see themselves as both offering an important revolutionary resource to China and active members of an international anarchist community.
*** The Chinese Anarchist Scene in the 1930s
Organized Chinese anarchist activities in the 1930s, as far as the available sources reveal, centered primarily on the anarchist-run Liming Advanced Middle School and Pingmin Middle School in Fujian, and the Labor University and Lida Academy’s Agricultural Experimental School in Shanghai. Both sets of schools shared personnel and students, and from all appearances formed a loose community. It was quite common for students attending Pingmin Middle School to advance to Lida’s Agricultural Experimental School upon completing their studies in Quanzhou.[516] Both sets of schools represented the possibilities for anarchists to continue their work. As Japanese scholar Sakai Hirobumi has noted, the 1927 split between the GMD Right and Left and subsequent purge collapsed the possibility of an anarchist-fostered labor movement in urban and rural areas. Further, the ‘alliance’ of some anarchists with the GMD eliminated any remaining public influence over revolutionary discourse anarchists and anarchism possessed. This forced anarchists, now adrift from politics and national revolution to turn to the pluralistic possibilities that lay within other forms of anarchist practice. In the case of Kuang Husheng 匡互生, Liang Piyun 梁披云, Chen Fanyu 陈范予, Ye Feiying 叶菲英, and the others involved with Lida, Liming, and Pingmin, emancipatory education offered the brightest opportunity to propagate anarchist ideals and practices.[517] It provided an alternative means of affecting social revolution through the transformation of individuals, and from the transformation of individuals, the transformation of society. In this way, Chinese anarchist educationalists were not only able to tap into broader currents of anarchist practice, they were also able to tap into and take part in both international and local educational reform movements.[518]
Another way in which anarchists coped with their political isolation in the 1930s was to turn to publications and language. For the former, it is worthwhile to pause and briefly recap Ba Jin’s turn from anarchist activism to publishing in the 1930s and how he incorporated his anarchist ideals into his fiction and non-fiction. Shortly after he returned from Paris in November of 1928, Ba Jin rushed headlong into his nascent career as an author. He was not in Shanghai for the April 12, 1927 purge and subsequent massacre of the GMD left, but he remained observant of what was happening. In his letters to Emma Goldman at the time, he wrote despairingly of what had come to pass, finding fault in the attitude of his anarchist comrades, but saving his greatest scorn for the GMD and the CCP.[519] He was at a loss of what to do. In a reflection composed decades after, he wrote, “But as to knowing how to help the new in its battle against the old, the light against the darkness, I was still at a loss. I was not involved in the struggle in any practical, concrete way.”[520] Yet, at this time, he was also involved with publishing *Pingdeng* 《平等》 with Ray Jones and the *Pingshe* 平社 group in San Francisco.[521] He continued to translate and publish the writings of Kropotkin and other influential anarchist authors. He transformed his experiences and reminisces of his anarchist colleagues and activities into novels, short stories, and memoirs, writing anarchism into modern Chinese literature.[522] Most importantly, for our purposes, Ba Jin translated and introduced Chinese audiences to the struggles and efforts of Spanish anarchists fighting against Franco and the Falangists. In total, from 1936 to 1939, he translated over a dozen articles on the Spanish Civil War, and in so doing, according to researchers, implicitly argued for the shared qualities of Spain and China’s respective conflicts.[523]
At this moment, we will step away from Ba Jin’s translations on the Spanish Civil War to turn to the other option available to Chinese anarchists in the 1930s, language, mainly Esperanto. Esperanto came to China in the first decades of the twentieth century, with a major entry point via the first Chinese anarchist groups in Pairs and Tokyo.[524] Its early association with anarchism and radical thought would hold and the language would be viewed as a vehicle for language reform efforts by the likes of Lu Xun.[525] From its initial entry into China via major urban centers of Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, it spread to other parts of the country, most notably Sichuan, which would come to produce a number of influential Esperantists, including Lu Jianbo.[526] In the 1930s, after Lu returned to Sichuan in the aftermath of the consolidation of power under Chiang Kai-shek and the GMD Right, Lu published a number of Esperanto journals and study societies.[527]
One significant journal Lu was involved with was *Yuyan* 《语言》, which advocated the adoption of Esperanto and script reform for China.[528] But Lu advocated more than just language reform and the adoption of Esperanto. Esperanto’s connection to anarchism and radical internationalism played an important part in one of Lu’s other periodicals, *Chongjing* 《憧憬》(La Sopiro), which ran from 1933 to 1934.[529] In *Chongjing*, Lu published a manifesto introducing the Esperantist International Anti-Militarist Office, which was based in The Hague. He even provided the organization’s mailing address and encouraged interested readers to subscribe and join.[530] Through these two journals and others, Lu Jianbo continued to engage with anarchist thought and practice and maintain links with anarchist comrades across the globe. He and many of his cohort at these journals would go on to issue *Jingzhe* in 1937.
[[m-w-morgan-william-rocks-beyond-the-bounds-of-revo-3.jpg][Figure 3: Masthead from *Chongjing*, vol. 1, no. 6, 25 July 1933. Taken from Shanghai Municipal Library, *Quanguo baokan suoyin* www.cnbksy.com, accessed 27 June 2020.]]
*** Global Fascism and Anti-Fascism
As anarchists in China soldiered on with their activities in literature, language, translation, and education, political currents began to shift globally. The rise of fascist and rightwing parties in Europe, the Americas, and Asia presented new challenges. In Japan, the creep of militarism in the late 1920s and early 30s brought with it invasion and increased pressure on the
GMD to respond. The Mukden Incident in 1931, the Shanghai attack and establishment of Manchukuo in 1932 represented Japanese fascist militarism’s attempts to create a new international order in Asia with Japan’s imperial throne at the center.[531] An integral objective of this new order, their Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, lay in the overturning of European and American imperialism, and in this way it was anti-colonial and anti-imperial.[532] However, its conception of an Asian order with Japan at the center and other Asian nations and cultures supplying it with raw materials and economic resources shifted the heart of imperialist order from London and D.C. to Tokyo. The vision of society offered by this envisioned a martial Japanese culture in reverence to its emperor as the template for society, and it shared in other global and modern visions of a corporatist state and martial culture transforming the world through a new conception of the people and soil.[533]
Japan’s vision of an Asian internationalism was not even the only militaristic right-wing
vision within East Asia. In China, there were competing visions of an international Asian order. Hu Hanmin, Sun Yat-sen, and other GMD intellectuals offered their own visions of a Chinacentered Asian order that would throw off the yoke of Western imperialism.[534] This current of Asianism ebbed and flowed with the political fortunes of the GMD, but it remained within the background of its ideology. In the 1930s, after the leftist purge and Chiang Kai-shek asserted his pre-eminence, nativism and militarism became twin poles around which the Chinese people and nation could be revived and modernized.[535] Most recognizably, this took the form of fascist cliques, the Blue Shirts, and fascist political campaigns such as the New Culture movement.[536] But, efforts went much deeper and a whole cultural apparatus of periodicals and a literature of fascism flourished as well.[537] And, with all this, up through the Japanese invasion and the formation of the initial collaboration government, collaborationist leaders like Wang Jingwei offered their intellectual support of Japan’s efforts to create an Asian sphere. Wang hoped by collaborating with the Japanese, Chinese influence over the new Asian order could be somehow built into the system.[538] These twin poles of fascist imagination were joined by other Asian modernizers, revolutionaries, and fascists as well, and they linked up spiritually with political movements in Europe and the Americas.[539]
Most importantly, the bubbling of fascist politics and intellectual output in China mirrored what was happening in Spain. We think of Spain in the 1930s as alternating waves of leftist activism and oppositional, fascist politics. The second Spanish Republic, formed in 1931 after the fall of Miguel Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship in 1930, rode an initial wave of popularity.[540] The left-leaning Republican government instituted a number of reforms designed to free Spanish communities from older forms of hierarchy and restrictive social orders.[541] However, conservative forces united against these reforms and in 1933, defeated liberal and leftist parties in the elections. These conservative groups rallied under the Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (CEDA), a national party composed of various Catholic, Monarchist, and other right wing and conservative groups. At the same time, Primo de Rivera’s son, Jose Antonio, formed the Spanish Falangist Party and espoused his own version of nationalism, corporatism, cultural Hispanidad, and other fascist ideas.[542] In 1936, after anarchists, syndicalists, communists, and liberals united in a popular front to win the elections, military leaders instigated a coup from Spain’s Moroccan colony. The coup, initially stalled, spread across the country with the arrival, through the aid of Italian and German airlifts, of the North African Army under Francisco Franco.[543] Franco soon rose to become the paramount military leader and adopted Falangism as his guiding political ideology.[544] Battle lines were drawn as European powers stuck to policies of non-intervention, and the war soon became a battle against an international fascism of Franco, the Germans, and Italians.[545] Calls for international volunteers to defend the republic went out and through the Comintern, international brigades were soon formed and an international Left came to Spain’s aid.[546]
*** A Shared Anti-Fascist Struggle – The Spain in Chinese Hearts
The Spanish Civil War was a part of a shared global vocabulary, and it was a particularly important term to the global left. It represented the evils of fascism and the need for left-wing forces to rise against it, meet it, and vanquish it. Further, it represented the possibilities for social revolution. Current discussions on Spain during the 1930s focus on the conflict between Republican and Nationalist forces and the alarming violence it spawned. However, buried beneath these stories of civilian bombing, extrajudicial killings, and political treachery, were attempts by Spanish anarchists to realize a new type of society.[547] Collectives were formed in Aragon to provide different means by which agrarian populations could live and work.[548] Civilian militias, especially in the early days of the war rose to fight against the Falangist Nationalist forces.[549] Workers in Barcelona and Catalonia took charge of production and organized themselves into brigades that managed the city.[550] As captured by Orwell’s memoirs, social relations changed and the way people of different social classes related to one another became more egalitarian.[551] This revolution largely ended in the internecine fighting between anarchists and the communist-backed Republican forces in the Barcelona May Days of 1937, but it existed, and for those among the left who read past the front pages of mainstream papers, it proved inspirational.[552] But more than the revolution, Spain and its Civil War became an international cause, and for Chinese, it provided a sense of a shared battle against a global fascist wave from German to Italy to Japan.
As the Japanese invaded in the summer of 1937 and advanced west into China’s interior, GMD forces and the government regrouped first at Wuhan. Emphasizing the need to defend the new capital, GMD forces had long prepared defense plans. As refugees and forces gathered, the battle in Spain, particularly the Republican efforts to hold Madrid, became a rallying cry. As Stephen MacKinnon has pointed out, the phrase, “No Pasaron!” became a bridge between the two cities. More than that, international volunteers who had been in Spain soon came over to help China’s cause.[553] Chinese volunteers who had been in Spain, the likes of Xie Weijin 谢唯进 (1904–1978) and others, returned as well.[554] The progress of the war in Spain was a common site in the Chinese press and numerous articles on what was happening appeared in daily papers and periodicals.[555] Tokens of solidarity were shared as well. Through Chinese volunteers, the CCP sent a banner announcing Sino-Spanish comradeship to be presented to Republican leaders and Mao himself penned an open letter to Spanish forces in *Jiefang*.[556] News articles on Spanish reportage of China’s battle against Japan were printed in Chinese magazines.[557] Spain and China were linked rhetorically and symbolically, and discussions of how the Spanish and Chinese conflicts were part of a global fight floated in the air.[558]
Anarchists and those who held to anarchism in China too took part in this symbolic linking. In 1936, after being attacked by Xu Maoyong 徐懋庸 in a larger conflict over the nature of *Guofang wenxue* 国防文学, or National Defense Literature, Ba Jin took the opportunity to demonstrate the continued efforts of anarchists in China and to set the record straight on what it was that anarchists wished to achieve. Ba Jin’s response to Xu took three lines. First, he pointed to the efforts of the Quanzhou anarchists and pointedly remarked that their efforts were spent not on engaging in flowery banter with litterateurs, but in working closely with the common folk to improve their lives and aid society. He emphasized that though their efforts may be small, they were dedicated and patient in their exertion.[559] Second, Ba excoriated Xu for his complete misunderstanding of anarchists and his misreading of events in Spain and France. From this, Ba Jin described in detail the efforts of Spanish anarchists working to support the Popular Front in Spain and their efforts to bring about social revolution.[560] Third, Ba Jin’s intent in such a detailed description went beyond correcting Xu’s ignorance. In outlining the work of Spanish anarchists, Ba implicitly laid down his own conception of a united front, one symbolically between Spain and China, and one practically between the political factions within China.[561] In the aftermath of Ba Jin’s response to Xu, he went on to translate over a dozen of articles and stories about anarchist efforts in the Spanish Civil War. In his choice of translated works, one can see his emphasis on anarchist efforts to achieve social revolution and the difficulties they faced in doing so.[562]
*** Lu Jianbo, *Jingzhe*, and Chinse Anarchists’ Vision of Anarchist War and Revolution
*Jingzhe* was largely the outlet for Lu Jianbo’s vision of anarchist revolution. Born in southeastern Sichuan in Hejiang County 合江县, around the same year as Ba Jin, Lu began participating in radical politics as a teenager in school. In 1919, teachers and classmates introduced him to radical journals and articles of a variety of different ideologies. Among the texts that influenced him most was a translation of Kropotkin’s “An Appeal to the Young.”[563] The Kropotkin-ite influence was something shared amongst many anarchists in China, but what matters more is how Kropotkin ended up in the hands of so many Chinese youth. Networks of teachers and classmates along with periodicals and newspapers disseminated Kropotkin’s work along that of other anarchists and writings from other radical ideologies.[564] With his wider association with like-minded radicals, Lu was introduced to colleagues from other cities and provinces. This is how he came into contact with Ba Jin around 1920. They knew each other through letters and did not actually meet until a few years later while in Nanjing.[565] But their initial correspondence was indicative of how young anarchists in China came to know of one another and build relationships.
Piggybacking off the spread of printed material and personal networks were correspondence networks born of the broader print culture. Periodicals, pamphlets, newspapers, and books all contained contact information for publishers. Periodicals had contact information for subscriptions and places of sale, and communication with various radical journals was made easier. In some cases, like with the example of *Xuehui* 《学汇》mentioned in the introduction, anarchists utilized printed journals as notice boards. *Xuehui*, which was founded in 1921, and ran until 1924, made the notice board a regular feature its issues.[566] There, anarchists across China would notify each other of any pressing communications issues, their movements, requests for materials, publications of new journals and translations, and organizational concerns.[567] Lu too, after committing to anarchist action, would make use of these to let his colleagues know where he could be reached and to issue announcements for periodicals he edited and translations he published.[568]
Soon after his introduction to anarchist thought and practice in 1919, Lu became involved with radical study groups and publications. The teacher who introduced him to Kropotkin and anarchism, Li Zongbi 李宗泌, urged Lu to travel to Chongqing and join up with anarchists who had formed a study group there. From Chongqing, Lu was to find a route to Moscow to further his studies. However, upon arrival in Chongqing, Lu was told the opportunities to study in Moscow were closed down by the Beiyang 北洋 government.[569] Lu was forced to return to Hejiang, where he found himself in trouble with local authorities after leading student protests against the government. However, in 1921, he left Hejiang and joined a new anarchist study group at South Sichuan Normal School 川南师范, and soon began writing anarchist polemics for the *Chuannan ribao* 《川南日报》 and participating in further protests.[570] While at South Sichuan Normal, Lu came to the attention of the provincial warlord, Yang Sen 杨森 (1884–1977). For participating and leading anti-government protests, Lu was imprisoned and sentenced to be executed. Upon noting just how young Lu was at the time—he was seventeen—Yang Sen stayed Lu’s execution and had him released under Chuannan Shifan’s recognizance. Understanding the danger of any potential future arrests, Lu then made arrangements to leave for Nanjing the following year.[571]
Lu stayed in Nanjing for approximately two years, founding the journals, Minfeng 《民锋》 and *Heilan* 《黑澜》, and establishing himself as a militant comrade and activist. It was in these first journals that Lu first expressed his interest and connections to global anarchist movements.[572] Lu’s anarchist articles and anti-government polemics while in Nanjing landed him in further trouble with the authorities and he soon had to flee to Beijing to evade arrest. While in Beijing, Lu came under the care of Jing Meijiu, veteran anarchist and one of the editors of *Xuehui*.[573] Though constantly avoiding the ire of police and government censors, Lu made numerous acquaintances that would provide his network of anarchist contacts. However, it seems to be his Sichuan comrades that remained his career-long companions.[574] In 1925, after the May 30th demonstrations, Lu made his way to Shanghai, joining the large collection of anarchists living there. In Shanghai, Lu contributed to *Minzhong* and other publications and soon re-founded *Minfeng*.[575]
It is at this juncture that Lu Jianbo’s international connections to Spanish speaking anarchists became apparent. In 1927, Lu founded the Chinese Anarchist Youth Federation (CAYF) and soon after, their manifesto appeared in Spain in Barcelona’s *La Revista Blanca*, and at this time, it appears Lu began regular correspondence with *La Revista Blanca*.[576] Also, from this correspondence, it seems Lu got in touch with Spanish-speaking anarchists operating in Steubenville, Ohio and Buenos Aires, Argentina.[577] It was through these connections that Lu participated in a global survey on the state of the global anarchist movement that appeared in 1927.[578] It was these connections to Spanish-speaking anarchists that Lu would later use in the publication of *Jingzhe*.
Esperanto also played an important role in Lu’s connections to the global anarchist movement. Lu contributed Esperanto articles as to the state of anarchist activities in China to the journal of the Esperanto Stateless Association.[579] He was an avid participant of the Esperanto movement in the 1920s and both Spanish and Esperanto would serve as his connections to the globe. These connections built through Esperanto also aided his endeavors in the late 1930s in running *Jingzhe* and its anarchist takes on the war, and they would continue to prove useful throughout the remainder of his life.[580] In the early 1930s, Lu returned to Sichuan, eventually landing a position as a teacher at West China Union Advanced Middle School 华西协和高级中学. During his time at the school, he launched numerous publications, including *Chongjing* and *Jingzhe*, and formed numerous Esperanto societies.
Perhaps Lu’s crowning achievement as an anarchist polemicist, the Chengdu-based journal *Jingzhe* (1937–1940) sought to link China’s anti-Japanese War of Resistance to global anarchist anti-fascist struggle. Its main editing group, Lu , his wife, Deng Tianyu (n.d.), and their longtime friend, Zhang Lüqian (n.d.), were all long serving veterans in Chinese anarchist movements, with Lu and Zhang also being old comrades who first met in Sichuan’s anarchist circles in the 1920s.[581] In the context of anarchism’s declining fortunes in China, Japanese aggression, and the fighting happening in Spain, their formation of *Jingzhe* represents, in a sense, one last concerted push to engage still-existing Chinese anarchist communities into action.[582] Lu, Deng, and Zhang filled its pages with articles that joined anarchist revolution with the antiJapanese resistance in an attempt to address both wartime and anarchist agendas. From an anarchist perspective, these articles joined and augmented broader conversations in China as to how and to what purpose the Japanese invaders should be resisted. More importantly, they placed China’s struggle in an international context, linking China’s anti-Japanese war to anarchist anti-fascist resistance in Spain and the rest of the world.
Resistance in China lay at the forefront of *Jingzhe’s* agenda, but anarchist internationalism also lay at the core message. As seen in previous chapters, from the first appearance of Chinese anarchist groups, enacting international solidarity and revolution claimed equal importance with fomenting revolution within China. This went beyond translating the writings of European and American anarchists. It included forming personal and working relationships with international anarchists and, in some cases, even participating in international movements or inviting international anarchists to China.[583] The prominence of anarchists’ early victories in Spain encouraged Lu and other remaining anarchists in China. They saw their own country’s plight in the Spanish anarchists’ struggle against Franco’s fascist Falangist party. International anti-fascist solidarity became a rallying point for Chinese anarchists, and *Jingzhe* was an important outpost for this. Ultimately, *Jingzhe* stopped publishing in 1940 but, for a brief moment, it provided an anarchist voice in approaching the anti-Japanese war.
[[m-w-morgan-william-rocks-beyond-the-bounds-of-revo-4.png][Figure 4: *Jingzhe*, vol. 1, no. 3]]
[[m-w-morgan-william-rocks-beyond-the-bounds-of-revo-5.jpg][Figure 5: *Jingzhe*, vol. 2, no. 3, both issues taken from www.cnbksy.com, accessed 27 June 2020.]]
*** Reading Jingzhe for Where Anarchists Got Their Spanish News and How They Put It Together
Understanding how *Jingzhe* was put together is as important as understanding the intellectual, political, and social trajectories that coalesced around its establishment and the content it contained. Examining the journal’s physical make up allows us to understand its social life and follow the global and local links that enabled its production.[584] While we do not possess its circulation numbers, we do know where it sourced its articles for translation and possible avenues by which copies came to Lu Jianbo in Chengdu. Further, we also know where it was published and distributed within Chengdu, and where it received mail and correspondence. Additionally, through Lu’s correspondence networks, we have some idea of the people and institutions with which he was in contact. With this information, we can make some inferences as to its place within the local print landscape, the possible ways in which it fit into Chengdu society, and perhaps even see glimpses of Lu Jianbo’s collaborators.
Lu Jianbo and the editors for *Jingzhe* began publishing the journal in April of 1937, just four months before Japan’s full invasion. For much of its publishing run, it would have been subject to changing material conditions as far as the availability of print, ink, and printers. Also, it would have been increasingly subject to changing ideological environments in terms of censorship and the control of information. It should be noted that throughout its run, *Jingzhe* often contained a notice that it had been approved by the relevant censors.[585] As an anarchist journal, it contained a variety of articles that covered a broad range of anarchist-related topics.
In its pages appeared translations and original articles of anarchist polemics on literature, art, sciences, and politics. It also contained translations of important anarchist texts by the likes of Kropotkin, Goldman, Malatesta, and others.[586] It also, especially in the very early editions, contained a rather extensive literature section. In the literature section, there were translations of poems, plays and short stories by radical and progressive European and American authors. Moreover, numerous contributors to *Jingzhe* submitted their own original work.[587] The gamut of *Jingzhe*’s published articles suggests that Lu Jianbo and the editors conceived of the publication in much the same manner as Chinese anarchist journals from the 1920s, when anarchism was at the height of its spread in China.[588]
Further, the journal carried on patterns and compositional choices from Lu’s previous anarchist publications. On the cover page, each issue featured an artwork with a radical or revolutionary theme. For the first volume of the journal, this happened to be a taken from a woodcut of a collection of fists raised in unison, striking a defiant tone. Cover art from the second volume, which ran from December 1937 to July 1938, was a battle scene of flag waving revolutionaries storming enemy positions.[589] However, beginning with the third volume in September 1938, *Jingzhe* was forced to drop any artwork from its pages and make use of lesser quality paper.[590] The resources available to print books, newspapers, and journals had come under stricter ration and as the Japanese advanced across China, proved harder to come by. This was acknowledged by the editors in the first issue of volume three.[591] Another casualty of the lack of paper and materials was *Jingzhe*’s length. For its first two volumes, each issue was thirty-plus pages and included a wide variety of articles. From volume three on, the paper shrunk to eight pages, averaging three to six articles.[592] The reduction in page count affected the editorial decisions of Lu Jianbo and his peers. From the beginning, the editorial afterword at the end of each issue detailed the complaints and difficulties over the lack of space. Articles that would otherwise be included or issued in full were commonly left out or serialized over a number of issues.[593] *Jingzhe*, like many papers were simply hamstrung by tighter and tighter constraints.
One victim of these constraints was the *Jingzhe* group’s attempts to start a publication series. In the final issue of the second volume, the *Jingzhe* group advertised a series of translations on the Spanish Civil War. Most of the titles in the series came from works already translated in *Jingzhe*, but there were a few that included extra materials. Along with the Spanish Civil War series, *Jingzhe* also advertised another collection of translated anarchist texts produced by its members. In general, there were few advertisements in the journal, and after the third volume, there were virtually none, save for a mention of available translations of Kropotkin by Ba Jin.[594]
Also, in the second volume of *Jingzhe*, there were numerous advertisements for a series of translations Esperanto textbooks. Originally by the Esperantist, Varanko, this set of primers was aimed at teaching Esperanto and promoting Esperantist ideology. The books included were *A Chinese-Esperanto Dictionary* 《汉世辞典》, *Esperanto Sentence Construction* 《世界语造句法》, *Esperanto Pronunciation* 《世界语发音学》, *Guiding Discourse to International Language* 《国际语导论》, and *Esperanto for Esperantism* 《为世界语主义的世界语》. Except for the dictionary, all books in this series were identified as translated by Lu Jianbo.[595] This promotion of Esperantism and Esperanto continued from Lu’s earlier journals in the 1930s.
Over the course of *Jingzhe*’s run, Esperanto would play an important role in defining the publication’s identity. On each issue, the date was given in both Chinese and Esperanto.[596] Moreover, much of the translated Esperanto material came from the Esperanto edition of the *Boletin de informacion CNT-FAI*, the *Informa Bulteno CNT-FAI*. Additionally, in many cases, throughout the translated texts, words and proper nouns that were difficult to transliterate into Chinese were also printed in Esperanto.[597] Esperanto’s importance to *Jingzhe* cannot be overstated, however, it must also be placed in context. The journal, after all, was printed in Chinese, and Esperanto, though important as an input for the journal’s articles, was sparingly used as a medium of communication. As financial difficulties and physical limitations imposed by the war affected print and paper quality, Esperanto was seen less and less in *Jingzhe*’s pages. These difficulties aside, *Jingzhe* would not exist in its finished form without the existence of Esperanto-language materials and their exchange across the anarchist networks in which Lu participated.
In terms of sales, there are no mentions of the publication’s financial situation within the journal, but from the masthead, we do know that it was advertised as carried by all major bookstores in Chengdu and for a time was specifically carried by Beixin Bookstore 北新书局. The editorial group listed numerous headquarters, with operations held out of Nanwaihua Guangyi Xueshe 南外华广益学社, Shiwen Tongxun She 时闻通讯社, Zhongshan Gongyuan Yifeng Chashe 中山公园宜风茶社, and various schools, among which was West China Union Advanced Middle School.[598] The constant switching of editorial headquarters was commonplace at the time, but we should pay attention to the group’s use West China Union Advanced Middle School. Schools were well suited for the discussion of radical and progressive topics, and it was at West China Union Advanced Middle School that Lu taught Esperanto and ran Esperanto clubs. It is quite possible that Lu and his cohort found a potential audience for *Jingzhe* there.[599]
Financial difficulties were also reflected the variety of content *Jingzhe* published, which also changed as the war advanced. For the first volume, from April to November 1937, each issue included a healthy literature section with translations and original compositions. This changed in the second volume. From the second volume, the literature section was dropped. For the first two volumes there was extensive coverage of the Spanish Civil War and translations from the *CNT-FAI Information Bulletin* as well as translations from European and American anarchist journals. The peak of Spanish Civil War coverage occurred in the second volume of *Jingzhe*, and while coverage of Spain continues through volumes three and four, the journal’s stance changed in regard to its editorial voice.[600] In volumes one and two, the editorial voice of *Jingzhe* is mainly through its translations of anarchist thinkers and Spanish Civil War reportage. It was an anarchist publication, but its voice lay more in cultural topics, particularly in women’s issues.[601] With volume three, the publication found its collective voice in response to the antiJapanese war. It is from here that *Jingzhe* really became an anarchist voice promoting an anarchist war effort.
The variety and breadth of translated articles on the Spanish Civil War demonstrate the depth of Lu Jianbo’s connections to Spanish-language anarchists. In turn, this breadth also reveals just how extensive a network for the dissemination of anarchist-related propaganda and reportage on Spain was. At this moment, we must pause and discuss five addresses, all of which appeared in the contact listings in the CNT-FAI Bulletin. No matter whether Lu Jianbo and the *Jingzhe* group came by the copies of the CNT-FAI Bulletin issues they used for translation directly or by third parties, they would have seen these addresses listed on the bulletin’s contact listings. The addresses are 32 Via Durruti, Barcelona; M. Mratschny, FREIE ARBEITER STIMME, 45 W 17 Street, New York; Rose Pesotta, Joint Council 395 St, Catherine West, Montreal; FREEDOM, 106, Cunningham Rd., London, W.12; and Guy A. Aldred, 145, Queen St., Glasgow, C.1. APCF, Rosehall St., Glasgow, C.4.[602] The Via Durruti address in Barcelona was the headquarters of the CNT-FAI’s propaganda office. At the beginning of 1937, Lu Jianbo wrote to the Esperanto Section of the office (in Spanish) expressing his condolences for the death of Buenaventura Durruti. It is not known how he came to have this address at the beginning of 1937, but there are possibilities in that he mentioned his connection to anarchists in Argentina and France. Also, his prior connections to the *La Revista Blanca* also would have been useful.[603] The New York address provides another clue as to where Lu and the *Jingzhe* group could have possibly gotten their materials for translation. This address was the headquarters of the United Libertarian Organizations, which ran *The Spanish Revolution* bulletin as an English language outfit that was independent (and later critical) of the CNT-FAI’s efforts.[604] Approximately three articles from this paper were translated in *Jingzhe*. The London address would have been the point of contact for *Spain and the World*, which was the publication issued by the Freedom Press during the war in Spain. Freedom Press and *Freedom* were well-known and Chinese anarchists were long in contact with that group.[605]
Other points of contact would have included Geneva and Paris, which were the operations centers for *La Reveil/Il Risveglio* and *Le Libertaire*, respectively. Lu Jianbo would maintain contact with most of these locations after the Second World War.[606] Another avenue for transmission of materials would have been through Chinese anarchists in Hong Kong. Chuang Chong 庄重 (??-1989), another Chinese anarchist with connections to Spain had CNT-FAI propaganda material sent there through his brother.[607] One more possible connection within Asia could have been Chinese anarchists in Southeast Asia or anarchists in Japan. In the donations and subscriptions ledgers in of the Esperanto *Informa Bulteno CNT-FAI*, there do appear the names of anarchists in Malaysia and Japan. Among those names is Yamaga Taiji, a known associate of Lu and other Chinese anarchists.[608] In all these various possibilities, the speed and efficacy of these networks must be considered. There seems to have been a lag of at least a month in terms of when the propaganda materials originally appeared and when they were translated and published in the pages of *Jingzhe*. This time lag only worsened as the situation in China grew worse. In the end, it appeared that the news from Spain became more of an example than a concurrent struggle.
There were a number of translators who worked on translating materials from and on Spain. Lu Jianbo, publishing translations under the pen name Tian Shenyu 田申雨, was one of the primary ones.[609] Other common names that appeared as translators were Luoji 罗辑 and Zhang Sen 张森. At least one of these two could have been a pen name used by Lu.[610] One other pen name that deserves mention is that of Chun Fei 春飞. Chun Fei’s name pops up approximately a dozen times, particularly later in *Jingzhe*’s run, especially in translating articles from French. While it is not known that Chun Fei was another pen name for Lu Jianbo, there is the distinct possibility that it was the pen name used by Lu’s brother, Lu Jianren. It is known that Lu Jianbo and his brother worked together to translate anarchist texts.[611] In fact, after the Second World War, Ba Jin, while writing to the Commission des Relations Internationales Anarchistes (CRIA) in Paris, specifically mentions Lu’s brother translating anarchist texts from French.[612] From this clustering of translators around Lu Jianbo, it is easy to see the periodical as the sole efforts of a select individual. The magazine certainly was under his vision, but this does not mask the tremendous contributions made by the wider global connections fostered among him and other anarchists across the globe. The web of correspondents needed for *Jingzhe* to build its vision of Spain, its revolution, and their connections to China necessitated widespread collaboration. As much as Lu Jianbo was the mastermind behind the periodical, it was the sum of the relationships he made in China’s anarchist scene and around the world.
*** Reading Jingzhe for an Anarchist Agenda for the Anti-Japanese War
*Jingzhe* ultimately came to an explicitly anarchist theorization of the war against Japan, but it did so through the intermediary of the Spanish example, and it always linked China’s struggle against Japan to a broader, global anti-fascist front. The first mention of such a position occurred in the October 1937 issue of the journal. In the piece “Women dang kangzhan” 《我们当抗战》, or “We Are in a Resistance War”, Lu, writing under the pen name Wu Yun 吴云, declares vociferously, “We are not facing a powerful enemy that fights for civilization, progress, or freedom. We are facing that little East Asian brother of German and Italian fascism, Japan, which sits astride our head, heart, and lungs. In this, Spain is our precedent.”[613] In this declaration of what the war is, Lu admonishes those who previously argued that fighting in Spain was an issue for the Spanish, and something that would never happen in China. In his admonishment, he cites positively those who chose to engage in symbolic acts of unity:
Even though, some time ago, commentators chided students for singing “Defend Madrid”, telling them that in no way would China become like Spain, now, when East Asia’s Germany-and-Italy has violently invaded China, we cannot afford to not follow in the footsteps of our brothers and sisters in the Iberian Peninsula. How can we bear to allow Japan’s violent aggression, which has enslaved and oppressed the peace and justice loving masses of our lands, spread outwards and turn the world into an ocean of blood?[614]
In Lu’s call to arms, another, more important of Spain’s example and actions comes to the fore. In how Japan should be fought, Lu directly and adamantly declares the war against Japan to be a war that “possesses profoundly revolutionary significance.”[615] This revolutionary significance lay in the opportunity for the mobilization of a broad, masses-based war against the Japanese. Lu pointed to the examples of the French and Russian Revolutions as dominated by a narrow range of political groups and classes.[616] China’s war against Japan was thus transformed from a conflict between two nations to a struggle to defeat the evils of global fascism, usher in an era of peace, and remake society and not just replace one state with another. To this end, Lu spoke of The Spanish Revolution as a guiding example and not the Spanish Civil War.[617]
Two themes that dominated *Jingzhe*’s early formations of a polemical line were a radical critique of the war as a result of capitalist rapaciousness and an exhortation for mass mobilization and self-organization. In other articles in the October 1937 issue of *Jingzhe*, authors painted chilling, vampiric pictures of capitalists and landlords sucking the very marrow from peasants and workers to create a class of slaves and servants. Japan, as an arch-fascist, arch-capitalist power waged war against China out of the capitalist need to not just dominate markets, but to physically control and create them.[618] *Jingzhe*’s authors outlined mobilization and organization in ways that focused on China’s youth acquiring martial prowess and cooperating en masse. In looking to mobilize, Chinese youth had the experiences of Spain’s popular militias to rely on, asking, “Have we not seen the greatness of the results of the heroic anti-fascist peoples’ brigades in Spain?”[619] Though the group’s authors claimed that a “A bourgeois mindset is not insurmountable, one only need the will, the will to overcome it,” at this stage, there was nothing explicitly anarchist in theory in *Jingzhe*’s arguments for mobilization.[620] The calls for a social revolution like that in Spain were yet to develop into concrete plans. Over *Jingzhe*’s next few issues, these themes continually surfaced alongside translations of reportage on the fighting in Spain. Again, and again, *Jingzhe*’s authors re-emphasized that the war “is to create an anarcho-communist society in which everyone is free, equal, and shares in the fruits of production. There will be no slavery, no masters, no nations, and no hoarding of wealth in private hands.”[621] As such, China’s resistance necessarily was a total resistance. It went beyond political and military resistance. It was a resistance that called to everyone to participate in the creation of a new world.[622] That Lu Jianbo and others at *Jingzhe* explicitly linked the call to mass resistance to the revolution in Spain both rhetorically and vis a vis the position of their polemics alongside the translated pieces from there is quite clear. However, given the increasing violence and material shortages experienced in China as the Japanese drove inland, the sidelining of anarchists in Spain after the 1937 Maydays in Barcelona, and ever more certain victory of Franco, *Jingzhe*’s editors must have known the relationship between the fighting in Spain and the just beginning Chinese struggle was changing.
In an editorial at the end of the sixth issue of volume two, which appeared in July 1938, the editing group laid out where they planned to lead *Jingzhe*’s polemics. They charted *Jingzhe*’s course, from its initial beginnings as an anarchist journal meant to inspire youth to its present focus on the anti-Japanese war and the revolution and fighting in Spain. *Jingzhe*’s editors declared they would hold the line, but they acknowledged that there would be changes in the coming issues.[623] These changes were announced both in a change of paper stock and materials and in Lu Jianbo’s opening article.[624] Intellectually and content-wise, the shift was more subtle. Extensive coverage of the Spanish Civil War remained, and the experience of the Spanish anarchists remained an example. However, the emphasis shifted from just showing what the Spanish anarchists were doing to calling on Chinese to act and mobilize and organize their own anarchist collectives and militias. Before Lu and others had merely outlined their view of how the war should be fought. In a series of three articles titled *Kangzhan zhu fangmian* 《抗战诸方面》(Aspects of the Resistance War), Lu set out to explicitly describe and theorize what resistance against Japan would mean and how it could be used to empower China’s masses. The series ranges over revolution, youth mobilization, the treatment of collaborators, economic wellbeing, international aid from Western liberal-democratic states, freedom of expression, total war, and other concepts Lu felt necessary to define in what ways Chinese resistance against Japan should take shape.[625] Lu’s anarchist critiques of the war, though not explicitly stated, became louder and louder with each article and by the end, there could be no denying a specifically vision of anarchist revolution through the War Against Japan.
With volume three, *Jingzhe*’s anarchist line became its own call to action. The first announcement of this position came in the opening piece to the first issue of volume three, “Gongzuo de taidu” 《工作的态度》 (Our Bearing on Work). In this piece, Lu issues a call to arms for anarchists in China to mobilize and organize, that “the example before our eyes is the revolutionary economic restructuring spearheaded by the CNT, FAI, and FIJL in the midst of the Spanish Revolution.”[626] The goal of resisting the Japanese was revolution, revolution to create an anarcho-communist society. This was a further evolution from the much more generalized revolutionary discourse in the “Kangzhan zhu fangmian” articles. Lu furthers the points he makes in “Gongzuo de taidu” in the next article, “Jige jiben de renshi” 《几个基本的认识》 (Some Basic Understandings). Lu opens this piece with an anti-government flourish, “Anarchists everywhere should hold firm to this one belief: government, no matter under what name or form, oppresses and strangles the many to protect the privilege of the few. This principle naturally also applies to when the proletariat becomes the government.”[627] With this, he identifies the revolution to be sought through the war against the Japanese was to be anarchist. Anarchist practice would be the bedrock of the mobilization he sought, and he exhorted his audience to stand fast.
In another set of articles, beginning with the piece, “Wuzhengfuzhuyi yu Zhongguo kangzhan” 《无政府主义与中国抗战》 (Anarchism and China’s War of Resistance), by Li Min黎民 and published in *Jingzhe*, in January 1939, took this theme further.[628] Calling for Chinese anarchists to join the war effort as mobilizers and organizers of the masses, Li Min’s article encapsulated *Jingzhe’s* major themes. Drawing from the thought of Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta (1853–1932), Li outlined anarchism’s place in China’s Anti-Japanese War of Resistance in terms of social revolution, mass participation, and international solidarity. In many ways, as Li asserted, anarchism provided a means to transform the war from a conflict between nations to a true struggle for national, social, and individual liberation. Anarchist organization was essential in empowering the masses to fight for their own emancipation and to create a society that would do away with all forms of political, social, and economic domination.
Li and the other contributors to *Jingzhe* sought “to end war through war”[629] and to “wash blood away with blood” 由血以洗血.[630] They reasoned that for anarchism to be an effective ideology of liberation, anarchists had to do more than merely call for peace and freedom. They had to actively pursue peace and freedom. Further, as anarchists, they were not to lead China’s masses of workers and peasants, they were to educate the masses so that they would organize and arm themselves for their own cause. As Li put it, “Our task in this war is not merely to resist the Japanese fascist imperialists’ invasion, but also to guarantee that the political and economic liberties gained through the masses’ sacrifices do not accrue to some “privileged class” or are stolen away by bandits. So, from the masses’ own struggles, we shall solidify and strengthen their organization so that they may resist all power and brutality!”[631] In the earlier article, “Kangzhan zhu fangmian”, published in March of 1938, Lu Jianbo had gone so far as to encourage anarchists to aid the masses in *quanmin kangzhan* 全民抗战 (war of popular resistance) that would ensure freedom from both Japanese invaders and future exploitative governments.[632] Lu and Li recognized that, philosophically, anarchist thought opposed war but, given the alternative of Japanese imperialist conquest, exceptions had to be made.[633] Furthermore, they reasoned, the extraordinary violence of Japanese invasion would only be replaced by the everyday violence of the state, so the people needed to arm themselves to ensure their rights in post-war society.
*Jingzhe’s* authors drew their support for an anarchist inspired war of popular resistance from the thought of Errico Malatesta, an influential Italian anarchist who urged anarchists to actively support any and all revolutionary efforts by industrial and agricultural workers. Moreover, they were drawn to Malatesta for his understanding of the importance of violence in achieving revolution. In justifying anarchist participation in the war, Li quoted a section from Malatesta’s essay, “Towards Anarchism,” which stated, “The normal peaceful course of evolution is arrested by violence, and thus with violence it is necessary to reopen that course. It is for this reason that we want a violent revolution today; and we shall want it always — so long as man is subject to the imposition of things contrary to his natural desires. Take away the governmental violence and ours would have no reason to exist.”[634] Li’s use of Malatesta’s argument, of course, went beyond Malatesta’s original intent of rationalizing armed resistance to state coercion. Malatesta had famously denounced anarchist participation in World War I and had characterized war as nothing more than a tool of capitalism and the state.[635] However, for Li, Lu, and the others at *Jingzhe*, Japan’s invasion of China was not just an affair between states. It pitted the forces of capitalism against the laboring peoples of China and Japan, threatening any hope for social revolution in China. In this sense, Li’s use of Malatesta, though made to fit China’s current wartime situation, retained the original intent. For *Jingzhe* group, an anarchist war of popular resistance was as much a tool of wartime mobilization as it was a tool to prevent any future Chinese “demon king from ascending the throne and demanding supplication and tribute from the masses.”[636]
Further, ideas of war of popular resistance and the wartime and revolutionary potential of the mobilized masses did not exist in a vacuum. Discussions on war of popular resistance and *quanmian kangzhan* 全面抗战 (war of total resistance) had been ongoing in CCP affiliated journals and newspapers, and the party itself had issued its *Shi da gangling* 十大纲领 [Ten Guiding Principles] on the war in August 1937.[637] In fact, Lu Jianbo, in explaining his reasoning behind his concept of war of popular resistance, pointed to articles by Fan Changjiang 范长江 (1909–1970), Shi Tuo 师陀 (1910–1988) (writing under the name Lu Fen 芦焚), and Zhang Jingfu 张劲夫 (1914–2015), writers who all had either CCP membership or affinity.[638] In his piece on resistance war, Lu used these articles as both criticism and encouragement. He specifically cited these articles as examples of how existing discussions of war of popular resistance and war of total resistance had not transformed into reality. The GMD government continued to operate under “feudal” principles, refusing to unleash the energies of the masses. At the same time, Lu praised Fan Changjiang’s arguments on how mobilizing and organizing the masses was not just a matter of military necessity. Mobilization of China’s masses also represented a matter of political rights and freedoms. A mobilized populace had a stake in the country’s politics and could serve as a check on government malfeasance.[639] In the end though, Lu remained skeptical of the ability of the CCP’s Ten Guiding Principles, or even the GMD’s Three People’s Principles 三民主义 to fully mobilize and organize the masses. He maintained that “under the restraints of ‘unity’ or ‘control,’ their energies could never be fully deployed.”[640] The masses ultimately had to lead themselves. Lu Jianbo may have shared in the vocabularies of communist and other leftist discourses, but his vision for a war of popular resistance remained true to his anarchist principles.
Li Min’s “Wuzhengfuzhuyi yu Zhongguo kangzhan” echoed Lu’s conclusions that mobilizing and organizing the masses is a task for the masses. Anarchists certainly could serve as guides and educators, but they were to never be a vanguard party leading the people. More importantly though, Lu, Li, and *Jingzhe’s* main goal was to revive and renew anarchist practice. As Li stated, “To strengthen the organizing of the people’s power so that they may undertake the arduous work of revolution, this is the great task we anarcho-communists set for ourselves in this war of resistance!”[641] Anarchists needed to involve themselves in day-to-day struggles to resist the Japanese and build a more equitable society. This emphasis on practical action came from the very real needs of the anti-Japanese War of Resistance. It also came from earlier debates in the 1920s held among Chinese anarchists and with communists and other leftists. However, later critics of Chinese anarchists often pointed to what they perceived as a penchant for meaningless theoretical debate and a lack of real-world activity.[642] Moreover, Chinese anarchists were themselves divided over how to proceed. Some anarchists, at the time, Lu Jianbo counted among them, wished to remain pure and separated from the country’s noxious political situation. Others, including Li Shizeng and Wu Zhihui, sought to work for anarchist goals through the GMD.[643] With Chiang Kai-shek’s 1927 massacre of CCP members that ended the first United Front, as well as his throttling of the GMD Left, that road closed. Dispirited at this turn of events, younger Chinese anarchists held an open forum on how to develop effective anarchist practice, but anarchism in China, according to the accepted narrative, largely faded into cultural and private pursuits.[644] *Jingzhe*, however, sought to reaffirm anarchist practice as a real method by which to achieve revolution. Whether the intended anarchist audience answered the call is uncertain, and beside the point. What Li Min, Lu Jianbo and everyone else with *Jingzhe* desired was real world anarchist revolutionary activity in China.[645] Regardless whether their voice reached a larger audience, they would persevere and remain steadfast in their work in publishing and participating in global anarchist networks.
As demonstrated, the pages of *Jingzhe* were filled with translations of articles and stories on the struggle in Spain. Further, Lu Jianbo, Li Min, and *Jingzhe* group filled their own polemical articles with declarations of solidarity with the Spanish anarchists. Li Min, in “Wuzhengfuzhuyi yu Zhongguo kangzhan”, explicitly linked Chinese anarchist efforts to Spain and, also, to the Abyssinian wars against fascist Italy.[646] Lu Jianbo, in an April 1938 article entitled, “Kang faxisizhuyi zhi dong xi zhan” 《抗法西斯主义之东西战》 [Anti-Fascist Wars of Resistance, East and West], outlines the similarities in Spanish anarchists’ fight against Franco and China’s war against Japan. Demanding his comrades’ solidarity with the Spanish anarchists, he declared, “We and our Spanish comrades are thoroughly anti-fascist. As we fight against fascism, we will follow in their successes and learn from their failures.”[647] These calls, moreover, were not just rhetorical. Lu Jianbo and his colleagues attempted to establish a Chengdu-based branch of the Solidaridad Internacional Antifascista (SIA). The SIA was an anarchist organization founded in May 1937 in Valencia, Spain that sought to garner support for the Spanish anarchist cause and to provide aid to global anti-fascist movements. Soon after, it opened branches in Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States, France, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Holland, Australia, and China (Hong Kong). The April 1938 issue of *Jingzhe* contained the bylaws and statutes of the organization, contact information, and solicited members and inquiries for their proposed Sichuan branch.[648] The importance *Jingzhe* placed in the internationalism of China’s anti-fascist struggle served both as a marker of just how connected China’s political and social plight was connected to other parts of the world, and as a reminder of the acute conditions China faced against Japan.
*** Conclusions
In the end, *Jingzhe* folded in 1940, after four volumes and twenty-two issues. Its readership and effect on any practical anarchist organizing remains unknown and understudied, and in the larger scheme of things, they were more than likely a voice in the wilderness. But, in articles like Li Min’s “Wuzhengfuzhuyi yu Zhongguo kangzhan”, other sides of the anti-Japanese struggle may be seen. As a whole, the journal sought to revitalize Chinese anarchist practice for a collaborative war effort that included China’s various factions and for social revolution. In so doing, it synthesized existing threads of anarchist thought and contemporary discourse and vocabulary used by Chinese leftist intellectuals so as to create a Chinese anarchist plan for a war of popular resistance. At the same time, it continued to connect China’s problems to the world’s, letting its audience know that China’s war against Japan was both a domestic and international affair.
Further, in the pages of *Jingzhe*, one can trace a still vibrant connection between Chinese anarchists and the counterparts across the globe. Lu Jianbo spent years building connections with European and Latin American comrades. These connections reveal a little studied relationship between Chinese anarchists and their Spanish-speaking peers. This is remarkable for the fact that it provides a personal dimension to anarchist practice in China. Scholars have long focused on the ideological connections and we know the importance of the role of Kropotkin’s thought in the way Chinese anarchists approached their tasks.[649] But examining the translations that appeared in *Jingzhe*’s pages, we can now see how and through whom anarchist thought appeared to readers in China. Lu Jianbo’s correspondence with the likes of Pierre Ramus, the Esperanto Stateless Association, and the CNT-FAI created avenues by which Chinese audiences could connect to happenings in Spain beyond what appeared in the mainstream press. Also, Lu’s correspondence and the publication of translations from the Esperanto *Informa Bulteno CNT-FAI* helped to further enmesh China’s remaining anarchists into a global anarchist press.[650] Even further, Lu and other Chinese anarchists participating in this global anarchist press helped create and expand the global image of Spain. At the same time, they provided a way for China’s own struggles to be viewed not only as a war against Japan, but as a revolution to change society.
Most importantly, the efforts of *Jingzhe* to propagate an anarchist view of the war and to maintain and develop international anarchist connections reinforce Ba Jin’s arguments with Xu Maoyong in 1936. Lu Jianbo and his anarchist cohort in Chengdu were not interested in engaging in haughty literary talk, they were interested in creating a platform for understanding and action. Through *Jingzhe*’s pages, they advocated not ideology or questions of definition, they argued for anarchists to contribute to the war. The journal was a call to action. That there was no anarchist front to the war in the end and that anarchism’s political fortunes did not revive miss the goals behind *Jingzhe’s* propaganda work. *Jingzhe*’s anarchists worked to fight against the Japanese and foster social revolution. When the periodical folded, Lu Jianbo and others did not stop their work.[651] They continued to publish in other papers and to create new ones. To paraphrase Ba Jin’s 1936 assessment to Xu Maoyong, they continued on in silence, working quietly and diligently to create better worlds.
** Chapter 6 – Post-War Networks and Afterworlds of Chinese Anarchist Activities
*** Reconnecting after the War
After *Jingzhe* ceased publication in 1940, there were no ostensible outlets for anarchist thought or activity in mainland China. Ba Jin, Lu Jianbo, and other major nodes of anarchist practice spent the war focusing their efforts on surviving and resisting the Japanese. The anarchist networks in which they participated lay shattered. This was as true for remaining Chinese anarchists as it was for other international comrades. Some exiled Spanish anarchists managed to fight with partisan forces in France.[652] Others remained in the United States or in Mexico.[653] Anarchists in America were too swept up in the war effort and found their voices, with the exception of a few periodicals, drowned out.[654] Some of the more pre-eminent anarchist papers, like *Freedom*, managed to thrive in the war, albeit under different circumstances and formats.[655] For the duration of the war, Lu Jianbo remained in Chengdu, teaching at West China Union Advanced Middle School 华西协和高级中学, moving to National Sichuan University 国立四川大学 in 1946.[656] Meanwhile, Ba Jin continued to write both fiction and reportage, with some of his most accomplished novels and stories being directly influenced by his wartime experiences.[657] After the war, both saw China slip further into chaos as civil war broke out between the CCP and GMD. In this continued instability, both sought to re-connect with their anarchist comrades across Asia, the Americas, and Europe, and reform, in some capacity, the anarchist networks that had existed before the war.
Lu Jianbo and Ba Jin’s efforts to re-connect with existing anarchist networks were at once both in line with their ideological commitments and representative of how for them, anarchism provided a source of affinity. Moreover, they were not the only Chinese anarchists or anarchistinfluenced individuals looking to re-forge old ties or form new ones. Lu Jianbo’s letters to anarchist periodicals in Europe and the Americas were peppered with descriptions of existing Chinese anarchist activities and the hope for more to come. Lu sought to revive Chinese anarchist movements, and to do so, he needed to request help, information, and texts from his colleagues abroad.[658] Ba Jin focused more on re-establishing personal connections he had initially begun in the 1920s and finding new anarchist comrades with whom he could collaborate on his numerous projects to translate anarchist texts and produce histories of the anarchist figures who inspired his undertakings.[659] In all of this, the networks they engaged in brought out new figures on the Chinese side.
Two of those figures, Liu Chuang and Darren Kuang Chen, both in their twenties, would serve as young nodes that bridged Chinese and Euro-American anarchist worlds. This chapter will follow their collective story, beginning with Lu Jianbo and Ba Jin’s restarts of their respective anarchist activities. Through the connections Lu Jianbo and Ba Jin made, we will arrive at the lives and anarchist proclivities of Darren Kuang Chen and Liu Chuang. To get there, we will first trace the world of anarchist publications available to potential Chinese anarchists through Lu Jianbo’s efforts to re-link Chinese anarchist movements with those around the world. From there, we will examine the personal networks Ba Jin engaged in, and through these, discover Darren’s place in Ba Jin’s exchange of anarchist materials between the United States and China. Darren was not just a conduit through which established anarchists like Ba Jin requested and received information, she, herself was a node in her own network of anarchist colleagues. While in Chicago and New York, she was regularly in contact with an anarchist old guard. From her networks, we come to Liu Chuang, a former classmate attempting to cross the Pacific to visit New York in order to pay respects to Rudolf Rocker and Harry Kelly, two veteran anarchists with whom he and Darren corresponded. In tracing the progression of these networks, the relational and comradely mode of Chinese anarchist activity may be revealed.[660] In the absence of any effective political or social movement, anarchism still held personal attraction as way of seeing and acting in the world. Moreover, it was a means by which individual anarchists built connections and ties to like-minded individuals Ba Jin, Lu Jianbo, Darren Kuang Chen, and Liu Chuang all not only sought a world they thought just and promising, they also sought to build relationships that could sustain them both in their beliefs and in their daily lives. For them, anarchism and anarchist activity still held promise, whether promise in rectifying a world gone wrong or promise in bringing individuals together across boundaries in an increasingly polarized world.
*** Lu Jianbo and a World Reconnected
In the October 15, 1927 edition of *La Revista Blanca*, published in Barcelona, anarchists, radicals, and other readers would have come across the following declaration: “The revolution in China is in danger. The white capitalists, the imperialists and their dogs, the Bolsheviks, The Kuo Min Tang and Chinese fascists—the henchmen of the true Kuo Min Tang—under the dictatorship of Chiang Kai-Shek, reign at this time in China, oppressing, massacring, cheating, and harming the proletariat.”[661] The remainder of the declaration outlined the further inequities visited upon the proletariat and underscored, through the writers’ own experiences, just how violently duplicitous and murderous the government in China could be. In the face of such violence and oppression, the Chinese Anarchist Youth Federation announced that it had reorganized from the older *Minfeng she*.[662] It opposed any compromise with governing forces, and those who called themselves anarchists yet cooperated with the GMD and other political parties, like Wu Zhihui, Li Shizeng, Shen Zhongjiu, and Jing Meijiu, were traitors who were to be ostracized.[663] The declaration proceeded with a call to arms to anarchists across the world and a request for them to translate and publish their (the CAYF’s) declaration. It ended by informing their global brethren that any inquiries should be sent to the “CAYF, PO Box 1387, Shanghai, China.”[664] The CAYF’s manifesto was indeed published in at least two further anarchist journals, *Avante*, which was published out of Monterrey and Tampico Mexico, and *L’Emancipazione*, in San Francisco.[665] The manifesto, its intent to place Chinese anarchists in company with their international brethren, and its architect, Lu Jianbo, were clear examples of just how embedded in global radical networks Chinese anarchists were.[666]
In 1946–1948, Lu Jianbo, with similar intent, attempted to re-connect Chinese anarchist circles to world anarchist movements.[667] The connections to Spanish and Spanish-speaking anarchists Lu first established in the 1920s proved paramount. In the 1930s, he and the *Jingzhe* group kept these links active as they translated articles from the FAI’s Barcelona-based *Tierra y Libertad* for the journal.[668] In early 1946, Lu resumed his correspondence with *Tierra y Libertad*, published-in-exile from Mexico since 1944. In the February 25, 1946 edition of the paper, Lu’s greeting to his international anarchist comrades was issued: “Since Hong Kong fell into the hands of the Japanese, we have had no contact with the outside world. We have long waited for news from the libertarian movements in America and Europe…. Now that the war has finished, we can resume our relations with our friends on the outside. We wish to exchange periodicals and letters with comrades from other countries. We send all a fraternal salute.”[669] The next issue of the paper contained a letter dated January 28 from Lu that explicitly stated his desire, which he stated on behalf of the China Youth Federation, for Chinese anarchist circles to reconnect with the world: “Help us regain our militant potential, if possible, dear comrades. We ask you to publish this letter in your paper so as to show anarchists in other countries that Chinese anarchism lives yet, and does not surrender to idleness.”[670] He appended this request with his address, “PO Box 55, Chengtu, Sze., China.”[671] Around the same time, Lu had also sent the same letter, translated into Italian, to the Geneva-based anarchist journal *Le Reveil/Il Risveglio*.[672] In both letters, he indicates that he and his Chinese comrades have also been in contact with the *Cultura Proletaria* group in New York.[673] In fact, in a letter from the June 22 edition of *Cultura Proletaria*, we learn that Lu and his comrades are overjoyed by the material and funds they began to receive from international anarchist cohorts. Though, they admitted there was still work to be done as the Asian-Pacific anarchist circles that were closest to them had not yet recovered and no news was yet to be had.[674] Yet, through these few years, we see, albeit spottily, a very real re-integration of Chinese anarchist practitioners with the wider anarchist world.
It was not just the Spanish anarchist communities with which Lu reconnected (and it was not only Lu who was reconnecting). Lu provided updates of the situation in China to the *Freedom* group in London. He did the same with the *Le Libertaire* group in Paris. In the US, he held what seems to be particularly close relations with the Italian *Adunata* group in New York. And with these reformed networks with international anarchist groups in the United States, he also re-activated his connection with Ray Jones and the remaining Chinese anarchists in San Francisco.[675] The resumption of organizational networks reignited personal ties. Aside from his contacts with anarchist groups, Lu utilized his connection with Ray Jones to exchange a wealth of materials.[676] In fact, at the same time Lu and Ray resumed correspondence, Ray Jones and Ba Jin’s own correspondence picked back up as well. Again, as with the high tide of Chinese anarchist practice in the 1920s, we see an incredibly thick network of personal and institutional connections that blossomed. Ba Jin, perhaps more than Lu, represented this. But as we will see, Ba Jin’s place as a personal node for anarchist connections was giving way to younger generations who were building and participating in their own anarchist networks.
*** Ba Jin and Agnes Inglis Redux
One of the more important networks Ba Jin developed after the war was his correspondence with Agnes Inglis from 1948 to 1950. Forward back, we first encountered Ba Jin and Agnes Inglis’s relationship when mapping the networks of Chinese anarchist activity in Chapter 2. Ba Jin and Agnes Inglis came together at a time in a vastly changed political, social, and cultural landscape, when networks were being re-established after the Second World War.[677] Anarchism as a world view and as systems of identifiable political actions, organizations, and lifestyles faced a world with very little space for it. Ba Jin and Inglis’s correspondence reminds us that even as anarchism, in both China and the United States, faded into political obscurity, erstwhile anarchists still carried on their cause and continued a wide range of activities, from schools and organizations to literature and the arts. From all this, what stories can be told and gleaned from Ba Jin and Agnes Inglis’s correspondence? Even though Ba Jin, during the 1930s and 40s, did as everyone else in China and identified as a Chinese patriot, his belief in anarchism and involvement in anarchist circles did not die out.[678] Moreover, in his interest in the Haymarket Affair, especially in its imagery of the martyred and romantic couple of August Spies and Nina van Zandt, he continued to be profoundly invested in writing the lives of female revolutionary figures. Secondly, it also shows, at the very least on a superficial level, a global connected-ness within the anarchist world. Ba Jin and Agnes Inglis shared similar webs of correspondents, as they both corresponded with many of the same figures within larger anarchist circles in the West as well as with a few committed Chinese.[679] This reflected that there were still communities of individuals excited by and/or connected to anarchist practices in China, and more broadly, that these communities maintained possibly significant connections to international anarchist organizations. Finally, it tells a story of the Labadie Collection. Ba Jin, via post, donated over forty Chinese-language books on anarchism. Ray Jones, both independently and in conjunction with Ba Jin, donated a similar amount. Together, they donated a corpus of over sixty books and pamphlets, some of which still survive both in the Labadie Collection and the university’s general library system.[680] In telling these stories, it is hoped that the intensity and camaraderie with which these globally linked individuals and networks approached their anarchist practices and beliefs may be brought out.[681]
Ba Jin’s continued involvement in the global anarchist scene needs to be refreshed and contextualized. By the early 1930s, he stopped writing polemical and theoretical articles for anarchist journals and focused primarily on his career as a novelist.[682] However, it would be wrong to conclude his interest in or adherence to anarchism died. He continued on as a translator of radical and anarchist works, publishing translations of important anarchist writers.[683] Perhaps his most important project of the 1930s and 40s was his translation and attempted publication of Kropotkin’s *Complete Works*.[684] During the late 1940s, even though anarchism was virtually non-existent as a social movement in China, figures like Ba Jin still supported the anarchist ideal. In March of 1949, Ba Jin wrote to the Paris-based Commission de Relations Internationales Anarchistes (CRIA), explaining that the anarchist movement in China was virtually dead, save for a few key individuals, and “In Fukien, and only there, there is a libertarian movement. It is not huge but it is real. There is a school there founded by our comrades and a small publishing house that has published ten or so pamphlets including Malatesta’s article on anarchy, as translated by Lu [Jianbo], and part one of my *Bakunin*.”[685] He also demonstrated his continued belief in anarchism through the correspondences he continued with other anarchist figures like Joseph Ishill, Ugo Fedeli, and, most importantly for our later nodes, Rudolf Rocker.[686]
Anarchism’s seeming lack of relevance as a movement did not hinder Ba Jin’s own anarchist commitment. Rather, it pointed to Ba Jin’s continued sympathies towards and admiration of anarchism. Moreover, for other like-minded individuals, anarchism retained a powerful vitality, a vitality that inspired a life-long dedication to the cause, even as communist and nationalist revolutions established new nation-states, and anarchism faded from the world’s political memory. It still offered sets of practices and modes of being in and thinking about the world as well as an ability to forge ties across boundaries that adherents and sympathizers found inspiring. Anarchism still offered an ideal that practitioners could work towards.
His correspondence with Agnes Inglis provides an important and strong reminder of just how much Ba Jin held onto his anarchist convictions. His initial requests were for materials so that he can complete his translations of Kropotkin’s *Complete Works*.[687] Inglis notes on November 21, 1948 that she sent Ba Jin a copy of a special February 1931 Kropotkin memorial edition of *Probuzhdenie*, which was a Detroit-based Russian language anarchist journal edited by John Cherney and others.[688] He remarks that it was his intention to later translate all the letters contained in the special issue.[689] For the remainder of the correspondence, he develops a keen fascination towards Nina van Zandt, who married August Spies, who himself was executed in the aftermath of the Haymarket Bombing trials, in 1887. Ba Jin initially calls her “mysterious” and later states a strong admiration for her.[690] Much of his correspondence with Inglis dealt with the exchange of information from the Labadie Collection on Nina van Zandt and August Spies. Interestingly, Ba Jin, in his December 31, 1949 letter to Inglis, in addition to thanking her for the van Zandt materials, also excitedly expressed that he was especially curious “about the wives and girlfriends of the martyrs” and that he desired “to know how they lived and acted during the trial and after the revolution.”[691] Ba Jin’s apparent concern for Nina van Zandt and other women involved in the Haymarket Affair continued his long held attraction and curiosity towards independent and radical female individuals.[692] In his anarchist histories, Ba Jin paid careful attention to female revolutionary figures and produced numerous biographies of such women. His interest in Nina van Zandt further reflected a theme in his novels, the place of gender in revolution. In fact, Ba Jin’s preoccupation with gender and revolution would later earn him a slight chiding from Inglis.
Towards the end of their correspondence, Inglis remarks that because of her and Ba Jin’s work, van Zandt will “go down in history, correctly recorded.”[693] And to ensure their work on Nina van Zandt would enter the historical record, she donated some of the primary sources they had worked over to the University of Chicago.[694] When she notified Ba Jin of this, she also made sure to ask about his wife. In fact, she almost always made sure to include his wife as a part of his work. Throughout their correspondence, there is a real display of camaraderie and concern for each other’s well-being. In one of their final exchanges, Ba Jin asked Inglis for a portrait of her as a keepsake and offered to send his own portrait in exchange. She replied that she would only oblige should his picture also include his wife. This gentle chiding may not have represented the more important issues they discussed, but it reflected, in part, both the affinity they felt for one another and served as a point of contrast between Ba Jin’s interest in female revolutionary figures and his own gendered attitudes about his wife’s position as companion and colleague.
Additionally, Ba Jin and Inglis’s correspondence list shows a loosely bound but shared network of like-minded anarchist individuals. At a very personal level, Ba Jin and Inglis shared a mutual acquaintance, one Darren Kuang Chen, a physiology student at Michigan, who later moved to Chicago and New York, and who was also a daughter of one of Ba Jin’s anarchist colleagues.[695] Darren was interested in anarchism herself, having read the works of both Kropotkin and Emma Goldman. Moreover, her father, Kuang Husheng, was an influential anarchist educator in China, having founded Lida Academy, an anarchist inspired school that combined physical and academic education, in Shanghai in the mid-1920s. Inglis and Ba Jin discussed Darren Chen’s fate throughout their correspondence, both showing great concern about Darren’s wellbeing. Darren eventually returned to China in 1950 and taught at the Experimental Biology Institute in Shanghai.[696] But before she did, she, with Inglis’s help, built her own international anarchist network, befriending Martin Gudell (1906–1993), who had served with the CNT during the Spanish Civil War, and corresponding with Harry Kelly (1871–1953), an influential anarchist educator, and Rudolf Rocker (1873–1958), a pre-eminent anarchosyndicalist theorist and former trade syndicate leader.[697] Her proximity to anarchists and Ba Jin did not end there. The head of the Shanghai Institute of Experimental Biology during the latter part of the 50s was Zhu Xi 朱洗 (1900–1962), a former anarchist and colleague of Ba Jin.[698]
Outside their connection to Darren, there existed a shared Chinese world in the correspondence between Ba Jin, Agnes Inglis, and Ray Jones (刘钟时). These three individuals exchanged books, information, and other materials from 1948 to 1950, expanding Ba Jin and Inglis’s original correspondence dialogue into a bit of an anarchist triangle.[699] Moreover, it turns out that Ray Jones was potentially the first Chinese anarchist to donate materials to the Labadie Collection in 1930.[700] As shown throughout, and especially through Lu Jianbo’s example, Ba Jin and Ray Jones were not the only Chinese anarchists or radicals who seemed to be involved in international correspondence networks.[701] As seen in Chapter 3, both Ba Jin and Ray Jones corresponded with ethnic Chinese anarchists in Cuba. The activities of these individuals only scratch the surface of how far committed Chinese anarchists reached out in their engagement. Moreover, this does not include who among the Western anarchists Ba Jin and other Chinese anarchists were in contact with. A brief survey of Ba Jin and Inglis’s correspondence partners demonstrates a who’s who among important anarchist figures in the West: Thomas H. Keel, Joseph Ishill, Boris Yelensky, John Cherney, Lilian Wolfe, Rudolf Rocker, Max Nettlau, Harry Kelly, Emma Goldman, and Alexander Berkman.[702] And on further investigation we see that Inglis mentioned her work and correspondence with Ba Jin to shared links on this correspondence web. It is not known to what extent any mutual recognition occurred, but Inglis spoke of Ba Jin as someone who should be known, a reliable comrade.[703] As such, it seems that Ba Jin, Inglis, and others operated in a multiplicity of overlapping anarchist networks. What these networks seem to imply is that there still existed a multiplicity of anarchist worlds in the late 1940s: a Chinese anarchist world, an Asian-Pacific anarchist world, and a global anarchist world. Nodal points within these worlds, like Ba Jin, Inglis, and even Ray Jones, served as connections between these worlds. Further, the physical environments they inhabited, Shanghai, Ann Arbor, and San Francisco served as nodal points as well.
Agnes Inglis and the Joseph Labadie Collection both served as a special node in Ba Jin’s multiple anarchist worlds. Moreover, they too served as a node within Ray Jones’s anarchist worlds. In fact, Jones began donating materials to the Labadie Collection in 1930, and he subsequently donated material again in 1934 and 1936. However, there seems to be a gap in communication between the two from 1936 and 1949, which Inglis acknowledged.[704] Similarly, this gap in communication is echoed in the known correspondence between Jones and Ba Jin during the same period.[705] That Ba Jin and Jones would apparently resume their contact, and soon directed much of their revived communication to Ba Jin’s donating of books to Inglis and the Labadie Collection says much about how the intellectual and social prospects of anarchism appeared to the three. Further, Ba Jin and Ray Jones’s use of the Labadie Collection points to a shared understanding of how they viewed the collection, compilation, archiving, and dissemination of knowledge as a key component of their anarchist identities.
An initial concern in all this is why Michigan and the Labadie Collection? In Ba Jin’s correspondence with Inglis, there is no hint as to why he chose to begin donating books across the Pacific, but a possible reason could be his connection to Jones, or his potentially coming across a 1947 article in *Freedom* on the scope of the Labadie Collection.[706] Upon receiving the first of his donated books, Inglis was delighted but was surprised “to receive your [Ba Jin’s] gift addressed to the Labadie Collection through me.”[707] Yet, as she explained, she already knew of Ba Jin and that the Collection already held some of his writings. Along with an attached list of Chinese-language anarchist materials held by the Collection, Inglis explained that “you will see that I have corresponded with the group in California.”[708] It is evident she assumed the California group, i.e., Ray Jones and the Pingshe (Equality Society), had some sort of contact with Ba Jin by virtue of their donating Ba Jin’s anarchist history, *From Capitalism to Anarchism,* and his novel, *Snow*.[709] However, Ba Jin never gives any indication as to whether it was through Jones and the Pingshe that he came to learn about the Labadie Collection. In responding to Inglis’s initial letter, he only indicates that he had “read from some paper that the Labadie collection grew and continues to grow under your [Inglis’s] arrangement and devotion.”[710] Obviously, the Labadie Collection’s function as a depository for anarchist materials was wellknown throughout the anarchist worlds Ba Jin inhabited. And it was this function, more than anything, that inspired Ba Jin to write to Inglis and the Collection. Certainly, Inglis was more than enthused to correspond with the Chinese anarchist as she firmly demanded that he write and explain his work and situation.[711]
Ba Jin never went into much detail into explaining his anarchist belief to Inglis. Rather, he, over the next two years, proceeded to send a combined total of forty-four books, booklets, pamphlets, periodicals, and photostats. His donations covered a wide variety, primarily from his fiction to his translations and historical writings on anarchism. Additionally, Ray Jones, beginning with his initial donations in 1930 on behalf of the Pingshe, donated approximately fifty through sixty Chinese anarchist texts. Inglis was only too happy to receive these gifts and would often brag as to how pleased Ba Jin and Jones would be to see their books shelved in the section on “Effort for Freedom in Other Lands.”[712] Certainly, by 1950, with the PRC having been founded the year prior, the need for Chinese anarchist materials, let alone anarchist movements, seemed potentially unnecessary. Further, since the early 1930s, with the exception of a few groups and locales, anarchism in China had ceased to operate as a social movement. But, seen in Ba Jin’s own continued translation of anarchist works (not to mention the experience of the Fujian anarchists and the *Jingzhe* group), anarchist-like liberation and emancipation and anarchism as an ideal remained attractive to committed individuals. As Ba Jin’s final remarks to Inglis indicated, with the land reform in China, there was hope for true human liberation.[713] And with hope there lay a need for the collection and dissemination of anarchist writings to help educate the masses. And this is perhaps what Ba Jin and Ray Jones thought they were doing in donating their materials to Agnes Inglis and the Labadie Collection.
Obviously, Ba Jin had ceased to be a militant anarchist activist. He was not a bomb thrower, and was never much of an organizer beyond the anarchist clubs and literary groups he founded. Ray Jones did help organize the Pingshe in San Francisco and through them participated in strikes and agitations. However, their main activities as anarchists were the building of networks and the writing and production of written materials to be printed, distributed, read, thought about, and, hopefully, acted upon. Ba Jin and Ray Jones were anarchist propagandists. They dedicated themselves to the intellectual and spiritual affirmation of the anarchist ideal. Most appropriately, Agnes Inglis and the Labadie Collection offered an opportunity to preserve their propaganda and to spread it to new audiences across the world. Anarchism, at the very least as an ideal and an intellectual and social pursuit, lay at the heart of Ba Jin and Agnes Inglis’s initial correspondence. They certainly did not plan a renewed anarchist social movement, but Ba Jin, Inglis, and later Jones and the other individuals revealed in these correspondence networks of individuals who believed in the anarchist ideal and sought to preserve and propagate it through their writings and collections. Keeping the anarchist ideal, its inspiration, and the communities it fostered alive animated their actions. In his preface to a 1939 re-translation of Kropotkin’s *Memoirs of a Revolutionist*, Ba Jin recounted the tale of a friend who had received a copy of Kropotkin’s autobiography from a stranger on a train: “She introduced that good book to this newly met friend. I do not know who that woman was, but I appreciate that someone other than me has obtained benefit from this book.”[714] In the same vein, Inglis, in her last known letter to Ba Jin encouragingly wrote, “One of these days you may be translating a work entitled, ‘Individualist Anarchism’, a thesis finished a year ago...[by] James J. Martin...here in the History Department. It is a fine and thorough work and one that has never been done before....”[715] Inglis’s encouragement, in fact faintly echoed a hopeful exhortation Ba Jin made to Ray Jones in 1929, as the GMD stifled not only independent anarchist activity, but also that of those anarchists who joined the GMD’s ranks:
...yet our ideal is the ideal of the common masses, of all humanity. The ideal is necessary for the common masses and all humanity to live a fulfilling life. The ideal is the lifeblood of the people. The ideal is necessary for the liberation of the common masses. The ideal does not concern itself with [our current] impotence, for it develops of its own accord. In China’s current climate, there truly is no possibility for an anarchist party. However, we must continue to give our utmost, for when the day comes, our hidden strength will come out. Our movement will break through and expand. Just wait. I believe this.[716]
In other words, the anarchist ideal would continue on. Ba Jin’s anarchist faith shows through in this, but it also shows through in his keen desire to research Nina van Zandt, as well as the sheer volume of Chinese anarchist books and materials that he and his comrades donated to Agnes Inglis and the Joseph Labadie Collection.
*** Chicago and Mohegan: Darren Kuang Chen’s Nodes and Networks
In Early June 1948, Darren Kuang Chen came to visit Agnes Inglis in the Labadie Collection on campus. She was twenty-seven years old at the time and studying physics and physiology in relation to medicine.[717] She was living with a family near the women’s cafeteria on campus.[718] During their first meeting, as Inglis described in a letter to Harry Kelly, Darren spoke to Inglis of her readings of Kropotkin and Goldman, her deceased father, and how she knew two of her father’s closest friends, Chinese anarchists Tchou Su, her teacher, and Li Pei-kan (Ba Jin).[719] They spent the afternoon going over the books recently donated to the Labadie Collection by Ba Jin and ones donated by Ray Jones and the Pingshe in the 1930s. Darren also mentioned she is friends with a young Chinese gentleman who first wrote Kelly years ago.[720] After conversing for a while, Darren then looked over the Collection, digging out writings by Kropotkin, Goldman, and Kelly. She was especially interested in Harry Kelly’s writings and went over older editions of *The Road to Freedom*[721], which Kelly edited, as well as some of Kelly’s archived correspondence. Inglis concludes her letter to Kelly anticipating future conversations between them about their Chinese connections.[722]
Soon after though, Darren had to leave Ann Arbor for Chicago. In her diary, Inglis notes that on August 14, Darren came to the Labadie Collection to inform her of her situation. Darren would be moving to Chicago with her current Ann Arbor landlord, Mrs. Staats, and her family. They were to move to a house in the Auburn-Gresham neighborhood in Chicago’s Southside.[723] The reason for Darren’s move was she was pregnant. Unaware of her pregnancy, she had come to Ann Arbor for her studies. However, soon after, she discovered she was with child. Alone, as her husband was in South America, Darren had no other financial support. To compound things, Mrs. Staats and her family were moving to Chicago, leaving Darren potentially with no place of residence. Mrs. Staats offered to let Darren move in with her family and take care of her for the duration of her pregnancy. The university approved, and soon after, Darren was living in Auburn-Gresham, Chicago.[724] After leaving Ann Arbor, Darren wrote to Inglis to let her know that she was happy to have made friends with her, noting that Inglis understood her better than most Chinese, that the Labadie Collection was outstanding, and that she wished to have Inglis’s recommendations for books to read so that she may better be acquainted with life in the United States.[725]
Interestingly, before Darren left for Chicago, Inglis was preparing to introduce her to the various anarchist personages who passed through the Labadie Collection. In a letter to Harry Kelly written shortly after Darren left, Inglis stated that had Darren remained in Ann Arbor longer, she would have introduced her to the Winokur family who were visiting Inglis and the Collection.[726] Inglis also intended to introduce Darren to Martin Gudell, who was due at the Collection for research.[727] Even though that did not come to pass, Inglis did request Gudell and his wife to visit and help Darren should they get the chance.[728] Surprisingly, it was to be through the Gudells’ friendship with Darren that the extent of her anarchist network was to be revealed. Soon after Inglis had asked Gudell to visit and look after Darren in Chicago, he responded to have Inglis inform Darren that he and his wife, Marie, would be visiting soon.[729] Writing to Inglis on September 18, Gudell informs her that he and Marie finally met with Darren. In this initial letter, he writes that he and Darren share a mutual friend and that overall, Darren makes a great impression.[730] Gudell continued his description of his meeting with Darren a few days later. After having lunch, Gudell, Darren, and Marie walked to Boris Yelensky’s house, which was approximately a mile away. They stayed and chatted awhile, and in the evening Yelensky was to hold a meeting of the Free Society Group (FSG) at his house. Darren elected to stay for the meeting and overnighted at the Yelensky’s. During the FSG meeting, Darren met with numerous anarchist colleagues and evidently made numerous connections. She updated everyone on the situation in China and promised to write an article summarizing everything happening in China regarding existing and past anarchist movements. She also agreed to have her connections in China write on happenings there as well.[731] Though evidence of whether Darren and the FSG followed through on these articles has yet to be found, the personal bonds forged between members of the FSG and herself were to provide a source of community for her. Immediately, aside from their proclivity for anarchism, Darren and Gudell discovered they had an intimate connection in their networks. They both shared a mutual contact, a Chuong Chong 庄重 who had been in Spain on the eve of the Civil War and had become close to the Gudells.[732] Chuong had studied humanities at university in France before moving to Spain in the late 1920s early 1930s. Evidently, Chuong participated in a series of anarchist conferences in Spain, which led to his deportation orders. Before returning to China, Chuong became engaged to and married a Spanish woman by the name of Francina. Gudell maintained his contact with Chuong and sent him copies of the CNT-FAI’s bulletins, which Chuong and his wife translated into Chinese and published in China.[733] This exchange of information was something that Chuong requested and directed as well. In a pair of 1935 letters written to Gudell, Chuong, writing in Spanish, outlined the current situation in China and requested additional propaganda materials be sent to China. In the letters, Chuong directed Gudell to send the materials to a Zhang Yan, who Chuong identified as his *hermano*, or brother/comrade in Hong Kong.[734] After the Civil War ended, Gudell and Chuong lost contact, with Gudell becoming worried about Chuong’s situation and was desperate for Darren to provide any confirmation of his whereabouts.[735]
For her part, Darren did her best to help ease the Gudell’s concern for Chuong. She told them both that she had met Chuong years before in Shanghai and that he was still active in Chinese anarchist circles. Further, Chuong, his wife, and their children were feted and viewed with some admiration among those in their circles. Darren also pledged to write to mutual acquaintances in China to find out Chuong’s location in China and inquire as to his and his family’s present health.[736] As for the continued existence of anarchist movements in China, Darren had less than promising news, that the war with Japan and wrecked any remaining anarchist organizations and networks. Nonetheless, the camaraderie over shared intellectual and social interests as well as the links created by mutual friends created brought Darren, Gudell, Yelensky, and the FSG together. Gudell left with the impression that Darren was most sympathetic and sensitive an individual.[737]
Furthering the linkages created by their intellectual affinities, the Gudells and Yelensky offered to assist Darren acclimate to Chicago and provide support during her pregnancy. Gudell and his wife Marie suggested Darren attend a city-run English language program that Marie found helpful. They even suggested Marie’s obstetrician, Dr. Yanofsky, to deliver Darren’s baby.[738] When Darren’s baby, William Staats Chen, was born on December 15 of that year, the Gudells were there in the waiting room at the hospital. Upon her and the baby’s release, Yelensky insisted that he take them home, though Darren declined in preference to Mrs. Staats. In the end, Yelensky did get to help out, delivering the Gudells’ old baby carriage to Darren for William’s use.[739] For all this, Darren was eternally grateful to the Gudells and Yelensky, writing to Inglis that she was amazed at all the friends she made in Chicago.[740] The network she formed with Martin and Marie Gudell, Boris Yelensky, and others came about through their anarchist sympathies and experiences, but it was also a network of firmly dedicated friends.
Through this all, Ba Jin remained in the background, as a node. He and Inglis continued their correspondence, exchanging materials and information. It was in the two months before the birth of William that Ba Jin received from Inglis a copy of the special Kropotkin-dedicated edition of *Probuzhdenie*. Inglis was able to find an available copy of the journal and ship it to Ba Jin, but in this, Darren served as an auxiliary for Ba Jin, passing along additional messages to Inglis and updating her of his current projects.[741] She also served as a conduit for other, unnamed, friends in China looking for anarchist and other radical papers held in the Labadie Collection.[742] Darren’s position in the United States and her connection to anarchists and radicals like Ba Jin only cemented her status as a node, connecting anarchist circles in North America and China.
*** Darren Kuang Chen as Node—Ba Jin, *The Six*, Grandpa Rocker and Mohegan
At this point, it is essential in this story to return Ba Jin’s nodal point to the foreground of this post-war network. As Ba Jin was re-constructing his international network or correspondents, one of the individuals he communicated extensively with was Rudolf Rocker. Ba Jin first wrote to Rocker in the mid-1920s. He was studying in Paris together with Wu Kegang and Wei Huilin and Rocker was living and working in Berlin. Ba Jin reminded Rocker of this when he took up their correspondence again in 1948, letting him know “I have got your reply [from then], and also your book on John Most from you, which is still on my bookshelf.”[743] His desire to re-open communications with Rocker lay in his efforts to translate influential anarchist works. At the time, Ba Jin’s main efforts were in translating Rocker’s important study of literary characters, *The Six*, and putting together a future project to translate Rocker’s complete works into Chinese. In quite a direct manner, Ba Jin wrote, “I shall be much obliged to you if you are kind enough to send me all your works which I haven’t got, for I am planning to publish the Chinese translation of your complete works if the situation does become much better afterwards.”[744] Unfortunately, Ba Jin’s situation did not improve, but he still planned his project to translate Rocker’s writings.[745] In the course of outlining these intentions to Rocker, Ba Jin also brought up the numerous shared webs in which he and Rocker participated.
Ba Jin expressed his need for Rocker to send him materials so he could move forward with his translation projects, and in so doing, he let Rocker know the various ways in which he consumed his writings. Ba Jin told Rocker, “I also read Spanish, Italian, French, and Russian. So I’ve bought from Cuba your ‘El pemsamiento liberal en los E. U.’, from San Francisco your ‘Socialism constructivo’; from England, ‘A-Syndicalism’.” Also, in the late 1930s, Ba Jin once had in his possession Rocker’s *Nationalism and Culture*, considered by many to be Rocker’s defining work.[746] Spanish and the Latin American connection seemed to be an especially important node in Ba Jin’s network with Rocker. In the late 1930s, Ba Jin translated Rocker’s pamphlet, “The Truth about Spain”, which was originally published in New York in 1936 by the Yiddish-English anarchist journal, *Freie Arbeiter Stimme*. At some point in 1947 or 1948, he had sent a copy of his translation to Cuba via the Solidaridad Gastronomica group.[747] From there, he also received, “the Spanish translation of the first volume of your Memoirs which Comrade Alonso sent me from Habana.”[748]
Buenos Aires and the figure of Diego Abad de Santillan (1897–1983) seemed to be the other pole in Ba Jin’s Latin American axis.[749] Although no known record of correspondence between Ba Jin and Santillan exist, his letters with Rocker do indicate that he knew Santillan at some level.[750] In his August 24, 1950 letter to Rocker, he requested, “When you write to Santillan, please tell him what I write you here” and to have Santillan send a copy of his translations of Max Nettlau’s unpublished documents. Later in the letter, he asks Rocker to have “friend Santillan to send the books to [Hong Kong], if there is no postal service between Argentine[sic] and New China.” Further, Ba Jin referenced numerous papers and translations that Santillan published and edited in Argentina. He knew that Santillan once published and translated Max Nettlau’s biography of Mikhail Bakunin in *La Protesta Suplemento* in the late 1920s.[751] He even expressed “hope that you can get for me the Spanish book you wrote about literature and arts. (I remember that it was published by ‘Protesta’ in Argentine[sic].”[752] In one of his earliest letters to Rocker, Ba Jin inquired as to whether he could have Rocker aid in procuring a “copy of the review ‘La Compara’ published in Buenos Aires, containing also your articles.”[753] Argentina and Santillan proved to be quite fruitful to Ba Jin in his networks, especially in the 1940s and in conjunction with his relationship with Rocker. Ba Jin and other Chinese anarchist connections to Santillan, Argentina, Cuba, Latin America and the Spanish-speaking world (namely those of Ray Jones and Lu Jianbo) remain understudied, but are quite understandable in terms of who were the larger and more influential anarchist communities at the time.[754] Further, they ways in which these connections combined with Rocker’s networks make even more sense when one considers that Rocker and Spanishspeaking anarchist communities were heavily involved in labor issues and anarcho-syndicalist trade issues.[755] Given that our knowledge of the labor-related aspects of Chinese anarchist practices still is quite opaque, there exists opportunities to study how these networks influenced Chinese anarchist actions among industrial workers in China.
However, in 1948, Ba Jin was decades past previous writings on laborers and their efforts to organize.[756] His friendship with Rocker revolved squarely around his work as translator and archivist of anarchist knowledge into Chinese. It is in this capacity that we return Darren Kuang Chen to her central position in this network. Darren served as a link between Ba Jin and Rocker in passing along books and relaying information in case there was a gap in correspondence.
Ba Jin’s first placement of Darren into his network with Rocker occurred in his February 4, 1950 letter to Rocker. Ba Jin writes, “I have mailed you one more copy of ‘The Six’ in Chinese translation through a Chinese friend (Old H. Kelly knows her) about one month ago.”[757] His translation of Rocker’s *The Six* was quite a proud achievement for him. He lets Rocker know that the translation’s first edition sold out and a second printing is one the way. He noted that it “is not a so-called ‘up to date’ or ‘a la mode’ book. But some of my friends like it very much.”[758] In the same letter, there exists another possible mention of Darren. After proudly waxing on *The Six* to Rocker, Ba Jin informs him that he finally “got a copy of the American edition of your ‘Nationalism and Culture’ from a Chinese friend, and also I got ‘Syndicalism’.[759] As Darren was one of Ba Jin’s important contacts in the United States at the time, she is a logical choice for Ba Jin’s Chinese friend. Ray Jones in San Francisco is another, but there is no mention in their correspondence at the time of Jones sending Ba Jin a copy of Rocker’s work.
Another key aspect in this exchange is Ba Jin’s apparent desire to learn Yiddish. As he translated Rocker’s writings, Ba Jin requested Rocker send a copy of *The Six* in Yiddish for his use.[760] The next year, after he let Rocker know of *The Six*’s Chinese publication, he again asked for Yiddish materials with which he could learn and work: “And I am much obliged to you if you can get for me some Yiddish books and one copy of ‘Yiddish grammer[sic]’. (I also want to get one copy of the Yiddish translation of ‘The Six’, if possible.)”[761] Darren, writing to Rocker around the same time relayed this as well as passing along the copy of Ba Jin’s translation entrusted to her. She emphasized Ba Jin’s desire to learn Yiddish. Though she did not remark as to why, Ba Jin’s reasons to learn Yiddish most likely stemmed from his methodology when doing translation work.[762] But, Darren did remark that Ba Jin primarily relied on the English translation of Rocker’s writing as a guide. So, any imperfection in Ba Jin’s language would come from his adaptations from the English version. Darren also further provided Ba Jin and Rocker some face, nothing that the complexity and literary qualities of Rocker’s language were difficult to render into Chinese.[763] Little to Ba Jin’s apparent recognition, she was more central and closer to Rocker than her appearances in Ba Jin’s letters let on.
Here we see just how little Ba Jin let on as to Darren’s status as an influential node in her own right. In his last known letter to Rocker, Ba Jin noted, “My friend Mrs. Dareen[sic] KuanChen wrote me that she has met you in N. Y. and talked with you, and she also sent you the book which I mailed to her from here.”[764] Though there is no way to know whether Darren informed Ba Jin of the circumstances, her meeting with Rocker in 1950 was by no means her first. She had initially met Rocker while living in Chicago with Mrs. Staats and participating in FSG meetings with Boris Yelensky and Martin Gudell. In fact, her first meeting with Rocker occurred in spring 1949. Further, it was Harry Kelly who introduced the two. Writing to Rocker in March that year, Kelly encouraged Rocker to meet with Darren, stating, “The comrades have spoken about you and she is anxious to see you. I will write and tell her to keep in touch with Yelensky and ask him to let her know when you come and if it is possible manage to see the both of you.”[765] Darren and Rocker’s first meeting apparently went well, for in a pair of exchanges with Rocker after she had moved to New York that summer, she let Rocker and his wife, Milly, know that she felt extremely lucky and thankful to have met them in Chicago. Further, she planned to visit the two sometime that summer in the Mohegan Colony, the anarchist community in which they lived.[766] Unfortunately, Darren was not apparently able to meet with the Rockers again until the following year.
Darren moved to New York to continue her university education. However, upon leaving Chicago, she lost the immediacy of her anarchist circle of friends and the support provided by Mrs. Staats in raising her child. As she let Rocker know, she did live with a Chinese woman who looked after the infant William while she was out.[767] She even was able to remain in correspondence with her Chicago anarchist community. Still, her experience in New York, especially in the first few months after moving there, were extremely rough. From information relayed to Agnes Inglis by Gudell, we know she did not receive a scholarship for study and was forced to work in a restaurant to support herself and the baby.[768] Things did manage to settle down for Darren and sometime in the fall and she found work in a university lab as a research assistant which helped in her taking classes. Moreover, her benefactors, the Gudells, continued in their aid and sent along any old baby clothing they had left over from their young boy.[769] Eventually, Darren was able to find a new circle of friends too.[770] In the late spring or early summer of 1950, she finally received news from her husband, who urged her to return to China to work as the government was offering her a job.[771] She would return to China, but she certainly had misgivings over the political situation at the time.[772]
But, before she left for Shanghai in autumn 1950 to embark on a career at what would become Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, she would meet the Rockers one more time. During that summer, with Harry Kelly, she arranged to meet with the Rockers in Mohegan. Her initial plans were, with baby in tow, to meet with Harry Kelly in New Rochelle and the Rockers in Mohegan. As it worked out, it appears she visited both Kelly and the Rockers in Mohegan.[773] Her visit seems to have been brief since she was busy with summer classes and the baby, but as Kelly noted to Milly Rocker, “she is anxious to see you and Rudolf.” From all accounts, Darren was indeed quite close to and fond of the Rockers and her connection to them was of her own making through her own network. The role she played in Ba Jin and Rocker’s own relationship was that of a node in her own right. Even more surprising, her connections to Rocker ran even deeper. There was one more piece to their network, that of her old classmate, Liu Chuang, an ardent admirer of Rocker and a close correspondent with Harry Kelly.
*** Liu Chuang, Rocker’s Friend from Afar—I Remain Sincerely Yours
“I suppose you know Darren Kuan. She is now studying in New York University. She wrote to me after comrade Kelly showed her my letter. I have not seen her for thirteen full years.”[774] Rocker received these comments from another Chinese correspondent, Liu Chuang. This particular letter was one of the last in a correspondence between the two that had begun in 1946. From Liu’s words, we can assume Liu and Darren were schoolmates or classmates in Shanghai sometime in the 1930s. Liu also knew of Darren’s late father, Kuang Husheng, and wrote admiringly of Kuang Husheng’s school, Lida Academy, which unfortunately, according to Liu, was more than likely “no doubt, in the red flood.”[775] Liu’s connection to both Rocker and Darren appears as happenstance, but also reveals a certain depth and connectedness among international anarchist circles. Further, Liu Chuang’s initial contact in the United States, who, again, was close to both Rocker and Darren, and who also knew Ba Jin in some capacity. Even after the war, and over such huge distances, it is astonishing that anarchists remained in tight-knit communities in which it was more than common to be on familiar terms with a wide number of comrades. Again, what Liu Chuang, Darren, and Rocker’s connection reveals is that even after anarchist movements lost momentum and influence, anarchists remained embedded in the material, informational, and social networks they built for themselves. More importantly, they carried their anarchist practices and beliefs with them in their daily lives and into the institutions and communities they inhabited.
Over the course of Liu Chuang and Rocker’s correspondence, key aspects of the reasons why these networks were maintained are laid bare. First, participation in these networks was intensely personal. The community and camaraderie established in these anarchist circles was based on shared goals and visions for home and world. In Liu’s second letter to Rocker, he lamented the lack of an anarchist movement in China and hope he could to turn to Rocker for aid in building one.[776] His despair at the state of affairs in China and the inspiration he took for Rocker, as well as Kelly’s anarchist experiences, and stature within various international anarchist communities were common themes over the dozen or so letters that survive from their exchanges.[777] In a way, Liu was paying homage to Rocker’s influence, but focusing on his sincerity in enlisting Rocker’s aid in the cause of creating an anarchist future for China belies the deeper, affective bases of their exchanges. Liu led an essentially transient existence, through which he one day hoped to meet Rocker and Kelly. Over the course of their relationship, Liu moves from Guiyang to Singapore to Java, and finally to Sumatra. Numerous times, when explaining gaps in responding to Rocker’s letters, Liu complained of his peripatetic wanderings and how they prevent him from having a forwarding address to use for his letters[778] His anarchist commitments, in this light, can be seen as a means by which he made sense of and gave meaning to his life.
As Liu lets Rocker know, it was in junior middle school that he first came to read his writings, and later, it was in senior middle school, around 1936, that he began corresponding with Harry Kelly.[779] His senior-middle school was in Shanghai, though there may have been a chance he attended the anarchist-run Pingmin Middle School in Quanzhou.[780] While studying in Shanghai, he came across a copy of the anarchist journal, *Freedom*. The copy Liu found happened to be edited by Harry Kelly, and that is how he came to begin writing to Kelly.[781] He kept up his letters with Kelly for the next year or so until he was forced to flee Shanghai in 1937 after the Japanese invasion. He served on the frontlines up north for nearly a year before being discharged for health reasons. Soon after, Liu attempted to return to school but ended up working for the government before bouncing around the interior and ending up in Guiyang in 1944.[782] In Guiyang, he worked as an interpreter for United States Army personnel stationed there and taught middle school. In Liu’s description, this was a lonely existence. In 1945, he felt settled enough to begin writing Harry Kelly once more and in this renewed exchange, he received a list of addresses of Kelly’s anarchist comrades. Rocker’s address was among this list.[783] It was seemingly this chance to correspond with Rocker (along with his revived friendship with Kelly), that gave Liu community, inspiration, and a purpose to work toward. From the very start of the correspondence, Liu was quick to declare a deep, personal friendship with Rocker. “You are at once an eminent scholar and noble comrade,” Liu tells Rocker in what is purportedly the first letter in their correspondence.[784] He repeated this sentiment throughout, ending each letter by addressing Rocker, his family, and their shared anarchist circle, and most often signing each letter with a variation of the phrase, “I am your sincere comrade.”[785] Moreover, it is through Rocker’s friendship that Liu found strength to overcome the vicissitudes of his life.[786] At the outset, Liu’s goal was to travel from Guiyang to New York so as to meet with Rocker and Kelly. At first, he was to leave for Singapore in the summer of 1946. However, this was delayed.[787] Liu did not arrive in Singapore until the spring of 1948.[788] From there, he was able to quickly move to his next destination, Cheribon, Java, where he would aid a friend in establishing a Chinese school. In Cheribon, Liu was finally able to settle down and work on arranging his travels to the United States. He contacted the US consulate and even asked Rocker to serve as a guarantor for his US visa application.[789] Rocker prudently advised Liu to not list any known anarchist figure on his application, and apparently offered to find someone who could help serve as a financial guarantor for Liu.[790] In the end, though, Liu never made it to the United States to see Rocker or Kelly. Seemingly, the victory of the communists founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 ended Liu’s hope. He felt stuck, despairing of what the communists would do to his home, and fearful of being caught up in anticommunist fervor in the United States.[791]
But as lonely and despondent as he might have seemed, Liu turned to his friendship with Rocker for support. He and the Chinese colleague he was working with at the school in Indonesia were attempting to publish anarchist pamphlets in Chinese. They lacked funds and quixotically asked Rocker as to whether he and comrades in the United States could raise USD $200 for printing costs.[792] And it was more than just the financial support that Rocker could potentially provide; it was the knowledge that he had Rocker and Kelly to turn to for moral support. For Liu, Rocker’s friendship, as well as Kelly’s, was a buttress. The correspondence he had with both veteran anarchists served to maintain his own momentum, even when things looked bleak. In the last known letter we have from Liu, he and his friends were looking to open a film production company (while still looking to have those anarchist pamphlets printed). They would be moving soon and had no reliable address through which Rocker could forward letters, but he remarked that Rocker’s letters were his only light, and that “I remain yours, cordially and sincerely.”[793]
Communications between Rocker and Liu end here in the historical record. Yet, their friendship remains a testament to anarchism not just as an ideology, but as a means by which like-minded individuals may find companionship. As an ideology, anarchism relied extensively on the propagation newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets, and books containing its messages. To spread these materials and messages, there needed to be networks and connections between individuals. These connections were web-like and could be incredibly dense in terms of overlap. Liu and Rocker’s network spanned more than their own immediate relationship. It included the presence of Darren, Kelly, and even Ba Jin. It reflected a globe of connections that extended past the immediate participants. Examining their relationship in this manner places anarchism and their anarchist connections into a broader context. Free from the restraints of needing to represent a political movement or ideological agenda, we can see how different modes of anarchist belonging and community were formed.
*** Conclusions
With Ba Jin operating as a node in the distance, younger generations of anarchist-inspired Chinese like Darren Kuang Chen and Liu Chuang came to the forefront as nodes in international anarchist networks. Ba Jin worked to maintain and expand his connections with the likes of Agnes Inglis so as to leave an archive of the knowledge and writings produced by Chinese anarchists. Lu Jianbo endeavored to re-establish those older networks in which Chinese anarchists participated before the wars that engulfed the 1930s and 40s. In the resumption of these networks, Darren and Liu who were closest and most involved in reconstituted anarchist networks, became most emblematic of these maintained links. Further, their involvement as nodes in these networks reinforce the personal nature of these connections. Quite literally, Darren had an anarchist family that cared for and supported her during trying financial and spiritual straits. Liu’s connection to Rocker provided an emotional rock as he journeyed across Southeast Asia. Anarchist movements could not be said to have existed on any large scale in China or the Chinese speaking world, but anarchist connections persisted through friendships and working relationships. Perhaps, it is better thought of anarchism and anarchists’ relationship to transnational migration. In one sense, anarchists were the ultimate migrants, and where migrants go, they take associated ideas and things with them. Materially, this is seen in Ba Jin’s donated materials at the University of Michigan testifies to the productive legacy of Chinese anarchism. Anarchists in China did more than engage in intellectual and polemical debates, they left a physical legacy in the pamphlets they printed, the presses and bookstores they founded, and the friendships in which they engaged. Though gone as a social force, anarchism lives on in those Chinese who were or have been touched by anarchist practice.
** Chapter 7 – Conclusion: Anarchist Ghosts and Remembrances of What Was and Will Be
*** Remains of a Scene
In late 1950, Agnes Inglis, the elderly curator of the Joseph Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan Library received a letter from her friend, Ba Jin, known to her as Li Peikan. Its last sentence read, “Perhaps I’ll have the chance to see the carrying out of Land Reform, the distribution of land among the poor peasants. That’s the destruction of the Feudalism in China. A great thing, of course.”[794] These lines were the last recorded words between Inglis and Ba Jin, who had become an important research associate in digging up the lost histories of the Chicago Haymarket martyrs. Anarchism, at the very least as an ideal and an intellectual and social pursuit, lay at the heart of Ba Jin and Agnes Inglis’s initial correspondence. They certainly did not plan a renewed anarchist social movement, but Ba Jin and Inglis believed in the anarchist ideal and sought to preserve and propagate it through their writings and collections. So too did their mutual colleagues who directly or indirectly participated in the broader network surrounding Ba Jin and Inglis’s exchange in the late 1940s. Ray Jones, Darren Kuang Chen, Lu Jianbo, Rudolf Rocker, Harry Kelly, Martin Gudell, Joseph Ishill, Boris Yelensky, Diego Abad de Santillan, and others all keenly felt, practiced, and lived what they believed to be anarchism’s ideals of humanism, liberty, and community. This desire to act on these beliefs is in part what led to their participation in global anarchist communications networks, sharing propaganda and news of their movements as well as keeping up with friends and comrades.[795] Through their letters, they made a community of activists and fellow travelers. In various shapes and guises, the communities built from these exchanges lasted for near on three decades.
1950, though, seems to be ending point of Chinese participation in these networks. As seen above, Ba Jin and Inglis exchanged their final letters in that year. Darren Kuang Chen returned to China in September of that year, bidding farewell to Inglis and Rocker. Ray Jones’s renewed correspondence with Ba Jin left the historical record as well. So did his letters with Lu Jianbo. Liu Chuang’s last letters to Rocker, and presumably Kelly, came in 1950 too. After that, Chinese anarchists seemingly faded from view. That is not to say they went and completely cut themselves off from their lives as anarchists. Ba Jin, though he later officially renounced his earlier belief in anarchism and deleted anarchist scenes from his novels, did not give up the humanism that he found in anarchism.[796] In the early 1950s, the CCP assigned him to travel to Poland to write an expose on the camps at Auschwitz. He infused his descriptions of the carnage he witnessed with the humanism that animated his earlier anarchist writings, and through this anarchist-derived humanism attempted to give meaning and hope to an all too bleak world.[797] Better known are his post-Cultural Revolution reflections, *Suixiang lu* 《随想录》, which arguably, are his now most widely read works. His ruminations on speaking truth to power and reckoning with the violence of the past have come to mark Ba Jin as perhaps China’s voice of conscience.[798]
Ba Jin’s commitment to the humanism he found in anarchist practice, even if he no longer called himself or his beliefs anarchist, was plain to see in his writings. For others, the values that grew from their anarchist involvements may have be not as discernible, but they remained. Ray Jones, towards the end of his life lived in isolation. Nonetheless, his belief in anarchism never wavered. In interviews with the historians Paul Avrich and Him Mark Lai, Jones proudly recalled his days organizing anarchist labor unions and disseminating propaganda. He even remarked he had been born to be an anarchist and that there was no other choice for him: “I think I was born anarchist. The idea was in me from the start. Anarchism is still the most beautiful idea, and I think someday it will come.”[799] More to the point, though shorn of his role as an anarchist organizer and propagandist, Jones turned to poetry as a means to express his longstanding commitment to anarchist practice.[800] Lu Jianbo seemingly buried himself in his work as a history professor at Sichuan University and was an active member of China’s Esperanto Association. But, his identity as an anarchist was kept alive in the Spanish-speaking world through the writings of Victor García.[801] Moreover, the anarchist reputations of all three were still acknowledged by younger generations of anarchists, such as when Ma Schmu 马世侔 (1936–2018), a Hong Kong-based anarchist, corresponded with Ba Jin, Ray Jones, and Lu Jianbo in the 1960s.[802] Even Darren Kuang Chen, though safely ensconced in what would become Shanghai’s Institute of Cellular Biology, still would have had contact with anarchists. One of her colleagues at the institute was Zhu Xi, one of Ba Jin’s collaborators in translating and publishing Kropotkin’s *Complete Works*.[803]
While it impossible to judge just how committed each individual was to anarchist causes, it is quite evident that their prior anarchist activities shaped their lives in various ways. The experiences they had while actively participating in anarchist movements imprinted on their psyches. At this point, in Darren Kuang Chen’s case, for example, it is well worth remembering that the birth of her child, William Staats Chen, was watched over by a large cohort of veteran anarchists. The infant Chen was clothed in anarchists’ clothes and was transported in a stroller donated by anarchists. While we cannot vouch for Darren’s intellectual commitments later in life, we can assume the kindness she received from Inglis, the Gudells, Yelensky, Kelly, and the Rockers was not something she easily forgot. After all, the imprint of her time in the United States rests in her child’s middle name.[804]
What these afterlives point to is best thought of as both a question of memory and an issue of reception. As we have seen in the case of *Liming*, *Pingmin*, and the Quanzhou anarchists, memory of Chinese anarchist movements within China has largely been subsumed under layers of political and social baggage. In *Liming*’s case in particular, the school has turned it into a depoliticized festival of cultural patronage. Ba Jin and Liang Piyun have been shorn of their anarchist pasts and re-packaged as cultural icons who graced the school’s halls and history.[805] In its logical extreme, this repackaging of Ba Jin’s identity culminates in a highly elaborate branding scheme that can be utilized for any manner of cultural projects and campaigns.[806] The reception of the anarchist pasts of Ba Jin and others demonstrates the multiple ways that anarchists and anarchism have been folded into post-1949 narratives of China’s revolution. Even Mao Zedong’s rise to ideological preeminence contains anecdotes of a youthful dalliance with anarchist ideals.[807] Among his earliest calls for mass mobilization of the people, he noted the differences between Marxist and anarchist methods. Finding Marxist emphasis on materialism and vanguardism, *ji yi qi ren zhi dao hai zhi qi ren zhi shen* 即以其人之道还治其人之身 [to do onto others as they do onto you], to be too extreme, he favored anarchist calls for the masses to organize themselves and to create a community that transcended national boundaries, *lianhe diqiu zuo yi guo, lianhe renlei zuo yi jia* 联合地球做一国，联合人类做一家 [unite the world as one country, unite humanity as one family].[808] However, these commitments to anarchism are no more than youthful digressions before adopting a more correct ideological line. Contemporary Chinese narratives of anarchism and anarchists position them as a transitional ideology, a transitional identity, a phase that merely needs to be noted, judged, and no longer discussed.[809] At best, anarchists could be remembered as harmless idealists. At worst, they were representative of youthful bourgeois malaise. Overall, anarchism and anarchists were a curiosity to remembered only to be assigned to history’s dust bin.[810]
*** An Anarchist Historiography of China’s Scene? Afterlives of Afterlives
Yet, the memory of Chinese anarchists is not the sole provenance of China, Taiwan, the CCP, or the GMD and the scholars who write party and national histories. Chinese anarchists participated in a global movement and they are remembered and historicized in their own ways by anarchists across the world. It is due to their participation in anarchist transnational movements that they have been transformed into historical subjects. More to the point, it has been through the interventions of anarchists writing history that we have come to know the intricacies of the Chinese anarchist experience.
Much has been written about how anarchists have their own sense of historiography, culture, and ritual.[811] The anarchist calendar is marked by events like the May 4, 1886 Chicago Haymarket bombing and the August 23, 1927 execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. The anniversaries of the births and deaths of important figures like Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Malatesta are also observed. Much of these events were recorded and coded into a historical narrative by Max Nettlau. Over the course of his career, Nettlau kept voluminous records of news clippings and correspondence with anarchists across the world.[812] He sought to chronicle not just anarchist movements in Europe, but across the breadth of the world. He wrote volumes of anarchist history and biography and was the first to set down a history of the anarchist movement in Latin America. His reputation as the master chronicler of anarchist movements earned him the moniker, “The Herodotus of Anarchism.”[813]
As seen in Ba Jin’s interactions with Agnes Inglis, Nettlau, moreover, was certainly not the only curator of anarchist history. Inglis’s own work in managing what began as the personal archives of anarchist and labor organizer Joseph Labadie, enabled the documentation and saving of anarchist materials and stories that would otherwise have been lost. Through her stewardship of the collection, anarchists across the United States and world visited, donated, and utilized the collection’s materials in researching and writing on the histories of transnational anarchist movements.[814] As anarchists were predisposed to historicizing themselves, they often turned their gaze to their comrades in China and beyond. Beginning with the publication of Albert Meltzer’s 1968 pamphlet, “The Origins of the Anarchist Movement in China” anarchists began to write histories of Chinese anarchists and their ideas of revolution.[815] It is in this context that we begin to see a historicization of Chinese anarchist undertakings.
Soon after, other groups and individuals began writing and compiling histories of anarchist thought and practice in China and Asia. One such group, CIRA-Nippon was formed in 1970 by Japanese anarchists influenced by the Centre International de Recherches sur l’Anarchisme (CIRA) in Lausanne, Switzerland.[816] Modeling itself after its European cousin, CIRA-Nippon opened a public reading room stocked with anarchist materials. It soon also began publishing Japanese-language bulletins that contained news on active anarchist groups in Asia as well as research into anarchist history. From 1974 to 1980, the group produced *Libero International*, an English-language journal that published histories of anarchism in Asia as well as current happenings for Western comrades. According to its mission statement, the journal was founded on “the belief that the facts about the energetic libertarian history of Asia should be marshalled and made available for Western as well as Asian comrades. Much of the historical material will be based on translations of existing materials in Chinese, Japanese and Korean. At the same time, we will try to bring together the general threads of the Asian situation by producing chronologies, summaries, book reviews, biographies, and so on.”[817] The journal primarily focused on Japanese and Korean anarchist histories, however it did publish some important articles regarding anarchists in China.
One such piece, by Nohara Shiro, was a history that focused on Chinese anarchist activity around the May 4th period.[818] For English readers, much of the material would have buttressed and supported Albert Meltzer’s 1968 pamphlet. Indeed, it supported and added detail to Meltzer’s tract. More importantly, the third edition of *Libero International* included an annotated bibliography of English and Western-language writings on anarchist, labor, and Marxist politics in China. Perusing the list, it is quite evident the breadth with which international anarchist publications had access to information coming from the PRC, but just as prominent were a slew of early academic writings on anarchist thought and practice in China. A who’s who of historians and academics appear on the Japanese anarchists’ list: Robert Scalapino, George Yu, Olga Lang, Michael Gasster, Martin Bernal, Chow Tse-tsung, Conrad Brandt, and Jean Chesneaux among others.[819] A fair number of PhD dissertations on anarchism appear as well, including Edward Krebs’s dissertation on Shifu.[820] Obviously, the annotated bibliography in *Libero International* demonstrated just how well informed anarchists could be about the contours of their own movement, but the main point lies in the present-mindedness of their attention.
As the CIRA-Nippon group stated, their aim was to not just focus on the history of anarchism in Asia, but also to provide a platform by which Western comrades could know what was happening with Asian anarchists in the now. One very important aspect of this was introducing audiences to a younger generation of Chinese anarchists, the Hong Kong group known as the 70s Front.[821] Formed in response to the expulsion of students who criticized the school administration’s censoring of student publications that occurred at Chu Hai College 珠海学院 in 1969, this loose collective published and participated in Hong Kong radical movements throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s.[822] Reflecting the group’s eclecticism, their flagship journal, *The 70s Biweekly* 《70 年代双周刊》,was a menagerie of anarchist and Trotskyite theoretical texts, translations, with a touch of cultural criticism. However, the group’s eclecticism was its downfall, and *The 70s Biweekly* ceased publication a few years after it started. However, its members splintered off into different projects and publications, carrying on the radical energies it had unleashed.
One of those groups was the Minus group, which published a series of journals titled *Minus* and became *The 70s Biweekly*’s de facto continuation.[823] *Minus*’s politics were tied up in the washout from the Cultural Revolution in the Mainland and the surge of radical politics that engulfed Hong Kong in the 1970s. Critical of the PRC and Maoist politics, they were supportive but more nuanced in their view of the ultra-leftist and splinter Red Guard groups that were feted by Western radicals.[824] The Minus group, like anarchists from across the globe debated and critiqued the direction of the Cultural Revolution and whether there were anarchist dimensions to it. In some instances, they even received supposedly firsthand reports from older Chinese colleagues about the possibilities of anarchist resurgence in China.[825] In others, PRC refugees in Hong Kong supplied their own voices. Moreover, Minus’s position in Hong Kong served as a node through which international anarchists came to understand what was happening in China.[826] Yet, despite the international and inter-generational community that formed around interest in Chinese radicalism, noticeable differences between how Hong Kong anarchists and their Western counterparts conceptualized anarchist practices in China had come to the fore.
Unsurprisingly, these differences centered on Ba Jin. As Ba Jin later did himself, the young anarchists of 70s Front and the Minus group questioned the sincerity of Ba Jin’s anarchism. They had argued that he had ceased long ago to be anarchist, and in many ways was never really a ‘hard’ anarchist who engaged in militancy (both charges to which he would admit fault).[827] Western anarchists felt differently and thought there much to be gained from Ba Jin’s perseverance in the face of CCP repression.[828] Further, through Olga Lang’s monograph and the publication of Ba Jin’s violent treatment and self-criticism at the hands of the Red Guards in 1968, Western anarchists and radicals came to view Ba Jin as another victim of conscience, as one more victim of a Marxist-Leninist state.[829] Perhaps, what lay at the heart of the difference was the extent to which Ba Jin had become identified with Chinese anarchism, at least in the eyes of Western comrades.[830] Nonetheless, though Ba Jin’s figure became reified and obscured other, more involved Chinese anarchists, the afterlives of the transnational networks that informed Chinese anarchist activities and aspirations remained.
If we view the 70s Front and Minus groups as afterlives of the initial transnational networks Chinese anarchists traversed in the 20s, 30s, and 40s, then perhaps now we are witnessing the afterlives of afterlives. In *Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution*, Arif Dirlik remarked that anarchism offered a revolutionary conscience that provided opportunities for reflection and possibility not encumbered by immediate needs to compromise and make revolution palatable to a skeptical audience.[831] Contemporary anarchist and anarchistsympathetic groups in the Chinese speaking world have taken inspiration from Dirlik’s thinking and have looked to buried anarchist pasts for resources. In 2013, the Nao 闹 Collective, an anarchist influenced forerunner to the Chuang 闯 Collective, announced a conference to reexamine the activities of Shifu and other early Chinese anarchists in an effort to enrich current revolutionary practice.[832] Nao’s call to study early Chinese anarchists was not to re-establish a Chinese anarchist movement, but to utilize their insights as a means to re-open possibilities that have been closed by present CCP state. A favorite topic was anarchist involvement in early trade unions in Guangzhou.
This sentiment continued with the formation of Chuang in 2015. Publishing both onlineonly articles as well as a printed journal, Chuang is an amalgamation of different groups and individuals. Chuang’s intellectual bent is eclectic, but the group more or less stakes a claim to a non-state, non-orthodox Marxism. However, Chinese anarchists have often shown up as theoretical and historical voices in their writings in an attempt to emphasize the need for a multiplicity of visions. As with Nao’s call for a re-examination of early twentieth-century anarchists, one of Chuang’s earlier essays focus on Shifu and the anarchist trade unions he and his cohort helped form in the 1910s and 20s.[833] They also take up the failures of anarchists, particularly Li Shizeng, Wu Zhihui, and others associated with the GMD to find a means of revolution outside the state. However, unlike earlier historians who have painted this failure as a lead in to the more successful revolutionary (and statist) discourse of the CCP, Chuang’s critique lies with how state structures in China have become ossified, with no available language or vision available to think outside it.[834] Within this critique, anarchist voices have grown in importance as a means of looking past the state.
The presence of anarchist voices has increased further with the outbreak of protests against the then-proposed Hong Kong Extradition Bill in 2019. Chuang’s coverage of the protests brought in grass roots voices outside the better-known factions and included interviews with Hong Kong anarchists that had been circulating among anarchist sites.[835] Underscoring this inclusion of anarchist actors was an insistence on building radical practices and understandings that de-centered the place of the state as the goal of revolution. For the anarchists Chuang interviewed, Hong Kong’s protests were not about reforming or replacing the current state but about opening up a new path and doing away with it all together.[836] Another aim was transnational solidarity with leftist organizations in both the Nanyang and the wider world. This plank has been somewhat reflected in the writings and activism of the Lausan Collective, which formed in 2019 in the wake of the protests. Lausan’s goals are transnational and they see themselves in league with a transnational, non-statist, non-hierarchical left. Taking both the PRC and the United States to account, the group has also, on occasion, looked to the 70s Front and Hong Kong’s radical past as a resource.[837] In fact, interest in anarchism and the 70s Front has piqued somewhat as a handful of articles on Hong Kong’s anarchist past have also appeared in major Chinese and English-language outlets.[838] While neither Lausan and Chuang explicitly call themselves anarchist, their interest in anarchist thought and practice represent a re-emergence of anarchist possibilities and a potential re-engagement with the broader transnational networks in which groups like the 70s Front and earlier anarchists traveled.
*** Final Thoughts
This brief coda of afterlives returns us to three of the central aims of this dissertation. First, by expanding outwards from the correspondence networks that Ba Jin, Ray Jones, and Lu Jianbo participated in, this dissertation has sought to reveal the vitality, variety, and global breadth of Chinese anarchists and their movements. From the very beginning, Chinese anarchists engaged in transnational activities, corresponding and collaborating with comrades in the Americas, Europe, and across Asia. Anarchists in China engaged with both Euro-American and Chinese intellectual, social, and political realities, articulating aspirations that sought to save China and the world together. Ba Jin, Ray Jones, and Lu Jianbo were some of the more visible activists to take part, but in demonstrating the range of their networks, it has hopefully been made clear just how widespread, numerous, and divergent in background and intention Chinese anarchists were. Reducing Chinese anarchists and anarchism to the persons and activities of Ba Jin, or Liu Shipei, Li Shizeng, Shifu, or others obscures this plethora.
Second, through these correspondence networks, we can begin to shift the story of Chinese anarchists away from merely focusing on the content of their thought, the depth of their theorizing, and begin to examine how they went about practicing anarchism. By narrating the story as less about anarchism itself and more about what anarchists did, we can further chip away at the teleology of 1949 establishment of the PRC as the culmination of revolution. Chinese anarchists were committed to working towards revolution, but they did so on their own terms and through their own projects. They persisted in their work because they felt it both personally and publicly meaningful. Exploring anarchist actions with this in mind, we can begin to more systematically approach traces of anarchist practice and contributions that linger in present day institutions in Chinese society.
Thirdly, in investigating the ways in which Ba Jin, Ray Jones, Lu Jianbo, Liang Piyun, Darren Kuang Chen, and Liu Chuang interacted with anarchists throughout the world, we may begin to understand how Chinese anarchists participated in a global anarchist community. Through such an understanding, we may further join Chinese anarchists to international anarchist trajectories within the wider historiography. Doing so is a necessary corrective to the common narrative of anarchism and anarchists as a Euro-North American affair. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Mexican, Brazilian, Peruvian, Cuban, Egyptian, Turkish, South African, Algerian, Libyan and other anarchists actively sought to promote and practice anarchism. Understanding their visions of anarchist thought and practice is a crucial step in understanding how anarchist movements thrived, how they declined, and how they proliferated even when they seem to have disappeared from the historical record.[839] This last point emphasizes an additional need to listen to the voices of anarchists themselves and challenges historians to look beyond academically produced histories to the histories written by anarchists and to be conscious of new or overlooked ways by which the stories of marginalized groups can be approached.
Ultimately, anarchism in China in no way succeeded politically or institutionally in the ways that the GMD’s nationalism and the CCP’s Marxism-Leninism have. Nonetheless, when looking beyond anarchism as an ideology and focusing on its social life and practices, we are forced to reckon with the deep and complex intellectual, social, and emotional lives that Chinese experienced in the tumultuous Twentieth Century. Moreover, we are forced to acknowledge that their lives did not revolve around the state. The lives, careers, and actions of Liang Piyun, Lu Jianbo, Liu Chuang, Darren Kuang Chen, Ray Jones, and even Ba Jin, all scrape against the monotone labels of Communist or Nationalist China. Further, they all reveal just how much a part of the world Chinese were and have been. Chinese anarchists were in no way to be limited by their national origins; they were members of a global community outside the confines of any state. The networks in which they travelled and communicated give stock to this. All this comes through seeing Chinese history and revolution beyond the bounds of the state.
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*The Anarchist Library*. [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/special/index][theanarchistlibrary.org]]
*Anarchy Archives*. [[http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/index.html][dwardmac.pitzer.edu]]
*L’Ephéméri de Anarchiste*. [[https://www.ephemanar.net/][www.ephemanar.net]]
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*Quan guo bao kan suo yin* 全国报刊索引 [[https://www.cnbksy.com/][www.cnbksy.com]]
*The Sparrow’s Nest Library and Archive*. [[http://thesparrowsnest.org.uk/][thesparrowsnest.org.uk]]
*** Consulted Periodicals
*L’Adunata dei Refrattari* *Avante*
*Banyue* 《半月》
*Black Flag* (London)
*Challenge*
*Chongjing* 《憧憬》
*L’Emancipazione* *Freedom*
*Heilan* 《黑澜》
*Jingzhe* 《惊蛰》
*Le Libertaire*
*Libero International*
*Liming Xueyuan Xinxi* 《黎明学园信息》 *Man!*
*Minfeng* 《民锋》
*Minus*
*Minzhong* 《民钟》
*Pingdeng* 《平等》
*La Protesta* (Buenos Aires)
*Rensheng* 《人声》
*Resistance Retort!*
*Le Reveil/Il Risveglio* (Geneva)
*La Revista Blanca*
*La Revista Única* (Steubensville, OH)
*Road to Freedom*
*Ruta* (Caracas)
*Shi yu chao* 《时与潮》 (Shanghai, 1929)
*Spain and the World*
*Spanish Revolution*
*Tianyi bao* 《天义报》
*Tierra y Libertad* (Mexico City, 1944–1988) *Vanguard Why?*
*Wuzhengfugongchan yuekan* 《无政府共产月刊》
*Xin shij* 《新世纪》
*Xuehui* 《学汇》
*Ziyou yuekan* 《自由月刊》
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Zhang Jiayu, “Qin Wangshan zai da geming shiqi guogong hesuo he qingdang wenti de gongguo shifei” 《秦望山在大革命时期国共合作和清党问题的功过是非》. *Minnan wenhua* *shengtai baohu qu*, 16 August 2016, [[http://www.mnwhstq.com/szzy/qzwszlqwk/201608/][www.mnwhstq.com]] t20160816_101465.htm.
Zhou Qihua, “Ba Jin yu Kelupaotejin” 《巴金与克鲁泡特金》. *Weinan shifan daxue xuebao* 《渭南师范大学学报》25, no. 4 (2010): 61–63.
Zimmer, Kenyon. “Archiving the American Anarchist Press: Reflections on Format, Accessibility, and Language.” *American Periodicals: A Journal of History and Criticism* 29, no. 1 (2019): 9–11.
---. “A Cosmopolitan Crowd: Transnational Anarchists, the IWW, and the American Radical Press.” In *Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW*, edited by Peter Cole, David Struthers, and Kenyon Zimmer, 29–34. London: Pluto Press, 2017.
---. “The Other Volunteers: American Anarchists and the Spanish Civil War.” *Journal for the Study of Radicalism* 10, no. 2 (2016): 19–52.
---. *Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchists in America*. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015.
---. “Positively Stateless: Marcus Graham, the Ferrero-Sallitto Case, and Anarchist Challenges to Race and Deportation.” In *The Rising Tide of Color: Race, State Violence, and Radical Movements across the Pacific*, edited by Moon-Ho Jung, 128–158. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014.
** Appendix
**List of Donations Made by Ba Jin and Ray Jones to Agnes Inglis and Joseph Labadie Collection**
| Title: | Format | Author/Translator: | Language: | Publishing Org./Date: | Donating Party: | Don. Received/Recorded: | Notes: | Library Status |
| Travail | Book, 824 pp. | Emile Zola/H.T. Pi | Chinese | Culture and Life Press, Shanghai, 1950 | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1948 April | | unknown |
| From Capitalism to Anarchism” 《从资本主义到无政府主义》 | Book, 330 pp. | Alexander Berkman/Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | Chinese | Equality Society, San Francisco, N.D. | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1948 April | The author says, “To Whom I owe most of my argument,” in referring to Alexander Berkman’s ABCs of Anarchism | unknown |
| “Actual Fact of Religion” | Pamphlet, 34 pp. | Equality Society | Chinese??? | Equality Society, San Francisco, N.D. | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1948 April | | unknown |
| Il Sangue di Spagna | Booklet, 56 pp. | Castelao/Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan | Chinese | Culture and Life Press (Edizione di Propaganda Pingming), Shanghai, 1948 | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1948 August | Later edition of SoS. Assumed that it is a complete version with all prints. Also, in 5/14/1949 Inglis gives receipt of this to Ray Jones. Possible Duplicate. However, this receipt lists the booklet at 44 pp. | unknown |
| The Trilogy of Love | Book, 524 pp. | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | Chinese | Kai-ming, Shanghai, 1939 | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1948 August | Deluxe edition, 1 out of 20 printed; Revised edition, 2nd Impression. The book contains: “Prelude”, pp.156; Mist, pp. 1–102; Rain, pp. 103–300; Interlude— Thunder, pp. 301–332??; Lightening, pp. 333–490; Appendix—Confession of the Author. | unknown |
| Title: | Format | Author/Translator: | Language: | Publishing Org./Date: | Donating Party: | Don. Received/Recorded: | Notes: | Library Status |
| Dream of the Sea | Book, 131 pp. | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | Chinese | Kai-ming, Shanghai, 1947 | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1948 August | 12th Edition | unknown |
| “Twenty Years in Schlusselburg” | Book, ??? | Vera Figner/Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan | Chinese | Unknown | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1948 August | Ba Jin in 3/9/1949 letter states this was sent. However, in 4/4/1949 letter, Inglis remarks that packages of materials arrived and would be listed on separate page. That page appears missing, but a later list from 4/21/1949 is present. However, this list contains a different work by Figner | unknown |
| The Six | Book, 235 pp., with illustrations | Rudolf Rocker/Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | Chinese | Shanghai (most likely), 1949 | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1948 August | Ba Jin writes on 9/6 and 10/29/1949 that the translation is complete and that it is published and will be sent as soon as the “port is opened for steamers.” On 12/31/1949, he says he sent Inglis a copy in addition to two letters (one in the care of Ray Jones). Inglis doesn’t acknowledge receipt until 2/28/1950. She says it has been bound and is now shelved. | unknown |
| Lev N. Tolstoy | Book, 117 pp. | Maxim Gorky/Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | Chinese | Ping-Ming Edition, Shanghai, 1950 | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1948 August | | unknown |
| Some Anarchists in Chinese History (Some Anarchists in Chinese History) | Unknown | Bian She-Chin | Chinese | Unknown | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1948 August??? | This appears on the 4/21/1949 list. However, this is never mentioned by Ba Jin. However, on 5/5/1949, Inglis mentions that she received three packages from him and that she would send a complete list of the items. The list, however, isn’t contained within the Inglis papers. | unknown |
| Title: | Format | Author/Translator: | Language: | Publishing Org./Date: | Donating Party: | Don. Received/Recorded: | Notes: | Library Status |
| Mutual Aid in the Chinese Village | Unknown | Tchou-Su | Chinese | Unknown | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1948 December | This appears on the 4/21/1949 list. However, this is never mentioned by Ba Jin. However, on 5/5/1949, Inglis mentions that she received three packages from him and that she would send a complete list of the items. The list, however, isn’t contained within the Inglis papers. Potentially different than his appendix in donated copy of Mutual Aid? | unknown |
| Anarchism | Unknown | P. Kropotkin/Liu Yilin | Chinese | Unknown | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1948 December | This appears on the 4/21/1949 list. However, this is never mentioned by Ba Jin. However, on 5/5/1949, Inglis mentions that she received three packages from him and that she would send a complete list of the items. The list, however, isn’t contained within the Inglis papers. | unknown |
| Anarchism in Chinese Thought | Unknown | Cheng Chia-Ai | Chinese | Unknown | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1948 December | This appears on the 4/21/1949 list. However, this is never mentioned by Ba Jin. However, on 5/5/1949, Inglis mentions that she received three packages from him and that she would send a complete list of the items. The list, however, isn’t contained within the Inglis papers. | unknown |
| The Economical Teachings of Kropotkin | Unknown | Woo Ke-kong | Chinese ??? | Unknown | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1948 December 19 | This appears on the 4/21/1949 list. However, this is never mentioned by Ba Jin. However, on 5/5/1949, Inglis mentions that she received three packages from him and that she would send a complete list of the items. The list, however, isn’t contained within the Inglis papers. | unknown |
| Title: | Format | Author/Translator: | Language: | Publishing Org./Date: | Donating Party: | Don. Received/Recorded: | Notes: | Library Status |
| Road to the Ideal Society | Unknown | Morito | Chinese ??? | Unknown | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1948 November | This appears on the 4/21/1949 list. However, this is never mentioned by Ba Jin. However, on 5/5/1949, Inglis mentions that she received three packages from him and that she would send a complete list of the items. The list, however, isn’t contained within the Inglis papers. | unknown |
| The Happy Society | Unknown | Woo Ke-komg (Woo Ke-kong?) | Chinese ??? | Unknown | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1948 November | This appears on the 4/21/1949 list. However, this is never mentioned by Ba Jin. However, on 5/5/1949, Inglis mentions that she received three packages from him and that she would send a complete list of the items. The list, however, isn’t contained within the Inglis papers. | unknown |
| A Guide to Anarchism | Unknown | Ye Lin | Chinese ??? | Unknown | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1948 November (Inglis made a formal acknowledgment in1949 February) | This appears on the 4/21/1949 list. However, this is never mentioned by Ba Jin. However, on 5/5/1949, Inglis mentions that she received three packages from him and that she would send a complete list of the items. The list, however, isn’t contained within the Inglis papers. | unknown |
| Letter from Dedham Jail, Mass | Photostat??? | Bartolomeo Vanzetti | English | Dedham Jail, Mass, 1927 June 9 | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1949 ??? | Notes stated: “In the July/August issue of “Resistance” Vol. 7, no. 2 is a letter dated June 9th 1927, from Dedham Jail, Mass., from Bartolomeo Vanzetti to Li PeiKan. It is now published for the first time. Another letter was published in the book of “Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti. The Inglis papers currently has 5-page photostat of the original letter. Also, 2/6/1949 letter from Ba Jin to Inglis indicates he mailed the photostat to her. | Photostat Confirmed Present— Inglis Papers |
| Title: | Format | Author/Translator: | Language: | Publishing Org./Date: | Donating Party: | Don. Received/Recorded: | Notes: | Library Status |
| Memoirs of a Revolutionist | Book, 582 pp. | P. Kropotkin/Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | Chinese | Kai-ming, Shanghai, 1947 | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1949 ??? | 1947 edition of his translation of Kropotkin’s memoir | unknown |
| Memoirs of a Revolutionist | Book, 582 pp. | P. Kropotkin/Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | Chinese | Kai-ming, Hunan, 1942 | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1949 ??? | War-time edition | unknown |
| The Kao Family | Book, 497 pp. | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | Chinese | Kai-ming, Shanghai, 1948 | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1949 ??? | 29th edition. “Description of an old Chinese family and its modern problems” | unknown |
| “A Guide to the Chinese Edition of the Complete Works of Kropotkin” | Booklet, 17 pp. | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | Chinese | The Complete Works of Kropotkin Publication Committee, Shanghai, 1939 | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1949 ??? | Inglis never writes a receipt for this, but instead acknowledges receipt of the materials in a letter about the photostat of Vanzetti’s 1927 letter to Ba Jin | Confirmed Present— Asian Studies Library |
| Words of a Rebel – Parole di un Ribelle | Bound Book, 372 pp. | Pietro Kropotkin/Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | Chinese | Shanghai, Pingming, 1948 | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1949 ??? | No. 11 Deluxe Edition. Preface by Li Pei-kan | unknown |
| Tragedy in the Dark Night – Six Essays | Booklet, 79 pp. | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | Chinese | Culture and Life Press, Shanghai, 1948 | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1949 ??? | | unknown |
| L’Aurora di Spagna | Booklet, 64 pp. | Sim/Ba Jin (Li Peikan) | Chinese and Italian | Culture and Life Press (Edizione di Propaganda Pingming), Shanghai, 1948 | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1949 ??? | New expanded edition of AoS; originally published in Spain in 1936 July 19th as “Estampa de la Revolución Espanola”. Contains CNT-FAI Portico that has been translated from Spanish to Italian by Ba Jin. Also, in 5/14/1949 Inglis gives receipt of this to Ray Jones. Possible Duplicate. | Confirmed Present— Inglis Papers |
| “Letter from Malatesta to Chinese Comrades of the Paris Laboro Group” | Photostat | Enrico Malatesta | Unknown | Photostat produced by Sin Chan | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1949 ??? | Does Sin Chan=Liu Chan, or are they two different individuals? | unknown |
| Title: | Format | Author/Translator: | Language: | Publishing Org./Date: | Donating Party: | Don. Received/Recorded: | Notes: | Library Status |
| “Photograph of Kropotkin” | Photostat | Unknown Photographer | ??? | Photostat produced by Sin Chan | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1949 ??? | In 3/14/1949 letter, Inglis remarks that the Photostat of Kropotkin and the Photostat of Malatesta’s letter have been “carefully enveloped and marked and replaced in the Chinese language Section in a box by the side of the books.” | unknown |
| The Happy Prince and Other Fairy Tales | Book ??? | Oscar Wilde/Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan | Chinese | Unknown | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1949 ??? | Ba Jin in 3/9/1949 letter states this was sent. However, in 4/4/1949 letter, Inglis remarks that packages of materials arrived and would be listed on separate page. That page appears missing, but a later list from 4/21/1949 is present. However, this list does not contain this work | unknown |
| Autumn in Spring | Book ??? | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | Chinese | Unknown | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1949 ??? | Ba Jin in 3/9/1949 letter states this was sent. However, in 4/4/1949 letter, Inglis remarks that packages of materials arrived and would be listed on separate page. That page appears missing, but a later list from 4/21/1949 is present. However, this list does not contain this work. | unknown |
| A Biographical History of the Russian Revolution | Book ??? | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | Chinese | Unknown | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1949 ??? | Ba Jin in 3/9/1949 letter states this was sent. However, in 4/4/1949 letter, Inglis remarks that packages of materials arrived and would be listed on separate page. That page appears missing, but a later list from 4/21/1949 is present. However, this list does not contain this work. | unknown |
| Spring (sequel to the Kao Family | Book ??? | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | Chinese | Unknown | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1949 ??? | Ba Jin writes on 3/21/1949 that he sent these books out. Inglis, on 4/4/1949 acknowledged that she knew they were on the way. However, they don’t appear the next list, dated 4/21. | unknown |
| Title: | Format | Author/Translator: | Language: | Publishing Org./Date: | Donating Party: | Don. Received/Recorded: | Notes: | Library Status |
| Autumn (Sequel to Spring) | Book ??? | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | Chinese | Unknown | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1949 ??? | Volume 3 of the Trilogy of Torrent. Deluxe edition limited to 25 copies and printed on Indian paper. Ba Jin writes on 3/21/1949 that he sent these books out. Inglis, on 4/4/1949 acknowledged that she knew they were on the way. However, they don’t appear the next list, dated 4/21. | unknown |
| The Perished. (Volume 1 of the Trilogy of Revolution) | Book ??? | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | Chinese | Unknown | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1949 ??? | Ba Jin writes on 3/21/1949 that he sent these books out. Inglis, on 4/4/1949 acknowledged that she knew they were on the way. However, they don’t appear the next list, dated 4/21. | unknown |
| Resurrection (Volume 2 of the Trilogy of Revolution) | Book ??? | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | Chinese | Unknown | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1949 ??? | Ba Jin writes on 3/21/1949 that he sent these books out. Inglis, on 4/4/1949 acknowledged that she knew they were on the way. However, they don’t appear the next list, dated 4/21. | unknown |
| My Life | Book ??? | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | Chinese | Unknown | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1949 ??? | Ba Jin writes on 3/21/1949 that he sent these books out. Inglis, on 4/4/1949 acknowledged that she knew they were on the way. However, they don’t appear the next list, dated 4/21. | unknown |
| Blood of Freedom—On the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Haymarket Affair and the Martyrdom of Our Five Comrades | Book ??? | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | Chinese | Fujian, 1937 | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1949 ??? | Ba Jin writes on 3/21/1949 that he sent these books out. Inglis, on 4/4/1949 acknowledged that she knew they were on the way. However, they don’t appear the next list, dated 4/21. However, this book did arrive and is currently held in the Buhr Remote Storage Facility. | Confirmed Present— Buhr Remote Storage Facility |
| Title: | Format | Author/Translator: | Language: | Publishing Org./Date: | Donating Party: | Don. Received/Recorded: | Notes: | Library Status |
| Life of Kropotkin | Pamphlet+B62 ??? | Anonymous | Chinese ??? | Ping-Ming, Shanghai (most likely), ??? | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1949 ??? | Ba Jin writes on 3/21/1949 that he sent these books out. Inglis, on 4/4/1949 acknowledged that she knew they were on the way. However, this does appear on the 4/21/1949 list. | unknown |
| Star—A Story about the Life and Work of Some Anarchists in Southern China, during the year 1930 | Book, 157 pp.??? | Ba Jin (Li Peikan)/Richard Jen | Chinese (pp. 79- 157)/English (pp. 1–78) | Shanghai (most likely), N.D. | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1949 February | Richard Jen Translated pp. 1-78/Inglis’s note: “Li Pei-Kan has been translating additional pages of “Star” to complete original translation. So far (November 1948) Pages 1, 2, 3 are ~~~ of unfinished pages.” | unknown |
| “An Appeal to the Young” | Pamphlet, 34 pp. | P. Kropotkin/Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | Chinese | Chu-ghing – Ping-Ming (Shanghai), 1938 | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1949 March | | unknown |
| “New Drawings” — no. 3“The Aurora of Spain” (AoS) and no. 4 “the Suffering of Spain” (SoS) | Booklet, AoS, 16 pp.; SoS, 12 pp. | AoS by Sim; SoS by Castelao (Alfonso Daniel Rodríguez Castelao)/Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan | Chinese | Shanghai (most likely), AoS, 1939; SoS, 1940 | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1949 March | Ba Jin also sent a later version of AoS to Inglis. | Both Confirmed Present— Buhr Remote Shelving Facility |
| “The Story of a Proletarian Life” | Booklet, 83 pp. | Bartolomeo Vanzetti/Ba Jin (Li Peikan) | Chinese | Culture and Life Press, Shanghai, N.D. | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1949??? | Second Edition | unknown |
| Title: | Format | Author/Translator: | Language: | Publishing Org./Date: | Donating Party: | Don. Received/Recorded: | Notes: | Library Status |
| Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist | Book, 283+ pp. | Alexander Berkman/Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | Chinese | Culture and Life Press, Shanghai, (Abridged Edition), 1947 | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1950 ??? | Seventh Edition Impression | unknown |
| Ethics | Bound Book, 569 pp. | P. Kropotkin/Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | Chinese | Shanghai, 1941 | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1950 May 24 | Ba Jin provided notes and appendix; Introduction by N. Lebedev, 1922, No. 16 | unknown |
| A Family Drama | Book, 189 pp. | A. I. Herzen/Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | Chinese | Culture and Life Press, Shanghai, 1947 | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | 1950 May 24 | | unknown |
| The Complete Illustrated Works of Kropotkin, vol. 6, Mutual Aid | Bound Book, 455 pp. | P. Kropotkin/Tchon Su | Chinese | Shanghai, 1939 | Equality Society | N.D., possibly 1936 | Tchon Su provided appendix, “Mutual Aid Among the Chinese People | unknown |
| The Complete Illustrated Works of Kropotkin, vol. 4, Bread and Freedom-The Conquest of Bread | Bound Book, 316 pp. | P. Kropotkin/Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | Chinese | Shanghai, 1940 | Equality Society | N.D., possibly 1936 | Ba Jin provided notes and introduction | unknown |
| Snow 《雪》 | Book, 227 pp. | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | Chinese | Equality Society, San Francisco, N.D. | Equality Society/Ray Jones | 1936 February 13 | “A Story About the Miner and the Employer.” | unknown |
| ‘For the Esperantismon and Esperantists.” | Booklet, 52 pp. | Lu Chien Bo (Jianbo) | Chinese | Equality Society, San Francisco, N.D. | Equality Society/Ray Jones | 1936 February15 | in Inglis’s receipt it is listed as 1926 by mistake. | unknown |
| “Equality” 《平等》 | Monthly | Equality Society | Chinese | Equality Society, San Francisco, 19271928 | Hippolyte Havel | 1929 December | Vol. 1, nos. 1, 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, vol. 2, June 1928 | unknown |
| “Kropotkin. His Life and Doctrine.” | Booklet, 48 pp. | Equality Society | Chinese ??? | Equality Society, San Francisco, N.D. | Hippolyte Havel | 1933 June 8 | Most Likely in Chinese/ Equality Society Address is 1129 Stockton Street San Francisco | unknown |
| Title: | Format | Author/Translator: | Language: | Publishing Org./Date: | Donating Party: | Don. Received/Recorded: | Notes: | Library Status |
| “AnarklKomunista Manifesto” | Booklet, 44 pp. | M. Novomirsky/Lu Chievi Bo (Jianbo) | Chinese | The People’s Struggle Foundation, China, N.D. | Hippolyte Havel | 1935 June 8 | Lu Jianbo’s address is given as Shanghai, Box 1387 | unknown |
| “The Chinese Vanguard” 《 先锋报》 | Semimonthly | “The Chinese Vanguard” | Chinese | All-American Alliance of Chinese Anti- Imperialists (AAACAI) | Hippolyte Havel | N.D. | One issue. Address for “The Chinese Vanguard” given as 48–50 13th Street, N.Y.C. | unknown |
| Sick Room Number 14 | Bound Book, 364 pp. | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | Chinese | Unknown | Ray Jones | 1949 September | Recorded in a list that was sent to both Ba Jin and Ray Jones | unknown |
| From Capitalism to Anarchism 《 从资本主义到无政府主义》 | Book, 318 pp. | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | Chinese | Unknown | Ray Jones | 1949 September | Duplicate copy. Inglis notes that one copy is placed in the Chinese Section and the other in Anarchist English Language books with those of Alexander Berkman | unknown |
| “Marxism” – Review | Booklet, 68 pp. | Lu Chin | Chinese | Unknown | Ray Jones | 1949 September | | unknown |
| Crushing of the Russian Revolution | Book, 100 pp. | Emma Goldman/Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) and Ching Mei | Chinese | Unknown | Ray Jones | 1949 September | | Confirmed Present— Buhr Remote Storage Facility |
| Zamenhof – His Life | Book, 194 pp. | Edmond Priva/Yang Ching Mei | Chinese | Unknown | Ray Jones | 1949 September | | unknown |
| Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist | Book, 283 pp. | Alexander Berkman/Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | Chinese | Culture and Life Press, Shanghai, 1947??? | Ray Jones | 1949 September | Duplicate copy of book already donated by Ba Jin. Inglis notes that one copy is in Chinese Section and the other is in Anarchist English Language Section with A.B.‘s other books | unknown |
| “Anarchy” | Periodical, Monthly | Equality Society | Chinese | June-December, 19334 | Ray Jones | Unknown | Nos. 1–7 (Complete) | unknown |
| Title: | Format | Author/Translator: | Language: | Publishing Org./Date: | Donating Party: | Don. Received/Recorded: | Notes: | Library Status |
| The Moral Teachings of Proudhon | Booklet, 30 pp. | P. Kropotkin | Chinese??? | Freedom Press, Shanghai, N.D. | Ray Jones | 1949 May | | unknown |
| A History of Russian Nihilism | Book, 338 pp. | S. Stapnick/Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | Chinese | Unknown | Ray Jones | 1949 September | | unknown |
| Ten Heroines of the Russian Revolution | Book, 372 pp. | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | Chinese | Unknown | Ray Jones | 1949 September | This in either vol. 18 or 19 of Ba Jin’s Complete Works | unknown |
| Lena – A Russian Girl’s Letters to a Polish Girl Friend | Book, 108 pp. | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | Chinese | Unknown | Ray Jones | 1949 September | | unknown |
| The Anarchists | Booklet, 80 pp. | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | Chinese | Unknown | Ray Jones | 1949 September | | Confirmed Present— Buhr Remote Storage Facility |
| Buenaventura Durruti (战士杜鲁底???) | Booklet, 45 pp. | Emma Goldman/Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | Chinese | Unknown | Ray Jones | 1949 May | | Confirmed Present— Buhr Remote Storage Facility |
| A Biographical History of the Russian Revolution | Book ??? | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | Chinese | Culture and Life Press, 1925 | Ray Jones | 1949 May | Seems to be a duplicate. In her Correspondence with Ray Jones, Inglis notes on 5/15/1949, that “I have copied the table of contents and have pasted it in the copy you sent, which is complete. This copy Li Pei-kan sent but you will see it is not complete. Two pages are torn out.” | unknown |
| The Struggle in Spain | Booklet, 26 pp. | Rudolf Rocker | Chinese | Unknown | Ray Jones | 1949 May | | unknown |
| The Struggle in Spain | Booklet, 44 pp., Illustrated | CNT-FAI | Chinese | Unknown | Ray Jones | 1949 May | an official CNT-FAI edition? | unknown |
| Title: | Format | Author/Translator: | Language: | Publishing Org./Date: | Donating Party: | Don. Received/Recorded: | Notes: | Library Status |
| Tze Yu Tsung Kan – An Anarchist Journal | Periodical | Tze Yu Shek | Chinese | Min sheng School of Agriculture, Tsuan Chou, Fujian, 1948 November 20 | Ray Jones | 1949 May | This is most likely the group/school Ba Jin is referring to in his March 1949 letter to CRIA? The Minsheng School of Agriculture was an afterlife of Pingmin Middle School. | unknown |
| “Am Voraben” | Playscript | Leopold Kampf/Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | Chinese | Unknown | Ray Jones | 1949 May | On 5/23/1949 Jones sends this list attached to a letter indicating this is a gift to the Labadie Collection. Inglis never sends a receipt of acceptance | unknown |
| “Story of a Proletarian Life” | Booklet, 40 pp. | B. Vanzetti/Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan | Chinese | Unknown | Ray Jones | 1949 May | On 5/23/1949 Jones sends this list attached to a letter indicating this is a gift to the Labadie Collection. Inglis never sends a receipt of acceptance | unknown |
| “La Evangelio de la Horo” | Booklet, 32 pp. | Paul Berthelct/Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan | Chinese | 1928 | Ray Jones | 1949 May | On 5/23/1949 Jones sends this list attached to a letter indicating this is a gift to the Labadie Collection. Inglis never sends a receipt of acceptance | unknown |
| “Long-Life Tower” | Booklet, 96 pp. | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | Chinese | Unknown | Ray Jones | 1949 May | On 5/23/1949 Jones sends this list attached to a letter indicating this is a gift to the Labadie Collection. Inglis never sends a receipt of acceptance | unknown |
| “Anarchy” | Booklet, 13 pp. | Sifo | Chinese | Unknown | Ray Jones | 1949 May | On 5/23/1949 Jones sends this list attached to a letter indicating this is a gift to the Labadie Collection. Inglis never sends a receipt of acceptance | unknown |
| Title: | Format | Author/Translator: | Language: | Publishing Org./Date: | Donating Party: | Don. Received/Recorded: | Notes: | Library Status |
| “God Ghost Man” | Book, 128 pp. | Ba Jin (Li Pei-kan) | Chinese | Unknown | Ray Jones | 1949 May | On 5/23/1949 Jones sends this list attached to a letter indicating this is a gift to the Labadie Collection. Inglis never sends a receipt of acceptance | unknown |
[1] Davide Turcato, *Making Sense of Anarchism: Errico Malatesta’s Experiments with Revolution, 1889–1900* (Oakland and Edinburgh: AK Press, 2015).
[2] The overall tone of the letter printed in the paper was quite polite. In some ways this was ironic since Sacco and Vanzetti were adherents of the brand of anarchist practice promoted by Luigi Galleani. *Galleanisti*, as Galleani’s followers were called, advocated violent insurrection and assassination. In the late 1920s and early 20s, *Galleanisti* carried out a spate of bombings and attempted assassinations of US political and business figures. The payroll robbery of the Slater-Morrill Shoe Factory in Braintree, Massachusetts (if not the murder, for which Sacco and Vanzetti were tried) were not actions that went against their beliefs. Their innocence in the affair is contested. Sacco, Vanzetti, and various anarchist and left-wing groups that claimed their innocence did not dispute their involvement in the robbery, but rather claimed that neither Sacco nor Vanzetti fired the gun that killed the guard and paymaster at the factory. However, several of their defenders as well as many historians have argued they were not involved in the robbery let alone the shooting. The protestations of Sacco and Vanzetti’s innocence along with eulogies of the nineteenth-century Haymarket martyrs have coalesced around subsequent narratives that have largely portrayed anarchists as victims of state-violence and have stripped them of their calls to violence and their theorization of its necessity and role in revolution. See recent and contested work by Timothy Messer-Kruse, *The Trial of the Haymarket Anarchists: Terrorism and Justice in the Gilded Age* (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013) and *The Haymarket Conspiracy: Transatlantic Anarchist Networks* (Urbana and Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 2014) for attempts to re-center violence within anarchist revolutionary efforts. Nunzio Pernicone provides the most accepted overview of Luigi Galleani, his followers, and their practices of anarchist violence. See Nunzio Pernicone, *Italian Anarchism, 1864–1892* (Oakland: AK Press, 2009). By all means, given the variety of anarchist action, it is impossible to reduce anarchist thought and practice to bomb throwing and murder plots. It is also impossible to deny the place of violence in the lead up to anarchist revolution. Chinese anarchists like Ba Jin 巴金 (1904–2005), as we will see later in this paper, acknowledged violence as a weapon of the weak, but in no way conflated violence with revolution. See discussion of Ba Jin’s “Anarchism and Terrorism” in Chapter 2 for an overview of how Chinese anarchists viewed violence.
[3] “The Sacco-Vanzetti Agitation—Protests by Chinese Anarchists,” *The North China Daily News*, 15 August 1927, 14. *The North China Daily News*, published in Shanghai from 1864 to the early 1950s, was one of the most important English-language newspapers in China. The demand to dismiss Judge Webster Thayer would have fit other protests and criticisms by anarchists and other left-wing groups over Thayer’s apparent biases and oversight of the trial. After the initial guilty verdict and sentencing, Thayer refused any requests for a new trial. After Sacco and Vanzetti’s execution in 1927, Thayer and the jury members were subjected to terror campaigns by the executed’s *Galleanisti* defenders. Thayer’s home was bombed in 1932, and Thayer spent the remaining year of his life under guard. In the mythology that surrounds Sacco and Vanzetti, they got the last laugh as Thayer died of an apparent aneurism while on the toilet. See Paul Avrich, “Sacco and Vanzetti’s Revenge, in *The Lost World of ItalianAmerican Radicalism: Politics, Labor, and Culture*, Philip Cannistaro and Gerald Meyer, eds. (Westport, Conn: Praeger, 2003), 163–171. Other important works on radical Italian immigrant culture in the United States are Marcella Bencivenni, *Italian Immigrant Radical Culture: The Idealism of the Sovversivi in the United States, 1890-**1940* (New York: New York University Press, 2014) and Jennifer Gugliemo, *Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880–1945* (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
[4] “Anarchists,” *The China Press*, 16 August 1927, 13. The *Shanghai Mainichi* was a Japanese newspaper based in the International Settlement, with offices at 77 Woosung Road.
[5] “Chinese Anarchists Protest Olympic Games ‘Fiddling While Rome Burns,’ Demand Release of Fellows in Jail,” *The China Press*, 3 September1927, 4.
[6] Chen Dengcai, “Fangwen Fan Tianjun xiansheng de jilu” 《访问范天均先生记录》[A Record of an Interview with Mr. Fan Tianjun], in *Wuzhengfuzhuyi sixiang ziliao xuan* [A Selection of Materials on Anarchist Thought] (*WSZX*), eds., Ge Mouchun, Jiang Jun, and Li Xingyi (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1984), 1048. This comes from a postscript in which the interviewer describes having attempted to verify Fan’s comments regarding the Chinese Anarchist Youth Federation with Lu Jianbo 卢剑波 (1994–1991), widely acknowledged as the group’s leading member. Not only does Lu refute any involvement by Fan, he refutes the group’s existence, stating it was something in name only. The original interview occurred in 1964, and while there are no reasons to suspect Lu of misleading the interviewers, perhaps the activities of the group were not something Lu felt inclined to discuss, given the political climate of the time. Yet, even if the Chinese Anarchist Youth Federation was indeed a made-up organization, advertisements and notices of their supposed activities appeared perhaps quite too often within *Minfeng*’s pages, as well as in other newspapers, for them to be considered fictitious.
[7] *The China Press,* 3 September 1927 and *The North China Daily News*, 16 August 1927.
[8] Ming K Chan and Arif Dirlik, *Schools into Fields and Factories: Anarchists, the Guomindang, and the National Labor University, 1927–1932* (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1991) is the only substantive account on the Labor University. Wen-hsin Yeh’s *The Alienated Academy: Culture and Politics in Republican China, 19191937* (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990) provides an informative overview of Shanghai University, another well-known radical school. John Israel’s *Lianda: A Chinese University in War and Revolution* (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999) looks at Herculean efforts to continue education during the War against Japan. John Dewey’s influence in China and its effect on pedagogy is another matter to consider. See Jessica Ching SzeWang, *John Dewey in China: To Teach and Learn* (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008).
[9] A few studies that show how widespread an ideology like anarchism was are Wen-hsin Yeh, “Middle County Radicalism,” *The China Quarterly*, no. 140 (December 1994), 903–925; Shakhar Rahav, *The Rise of Political Intellectuals in China: May Fourth Societies and the Roots of Mass-Party Politics* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); and Paul G. Pickowicz, “Memories of Revolution and Collectivization in China: The Unauthorized Reminiscences of a Rural Intellectual”, in Rubie S. Watson, ed., *Memory, History, and Opposition under State Socialism* (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1994), 127–148. An earlier discussion of how radical thought spread to China’s rural peripheries and how local intellectuals and activists interpreted and acted upon new ideologies can be seen in Mary Backus Rankin, *Early Chinese Revolutionaries: Radical Intellectuals in Shanghai and Chekiang, 1902–1911* (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971).
[10] “Zhongguo laodong qingnian zong tongmeng Hunan qubu wei jinri zong qingzhu jinggao minzhong” 《中国劳动青年总同盟湖南区部为今日总庆祝敬告民众》 [A Respectful Reminder from the Hunan Branch of the China Youth Labor Alliance to the Masses in the Wake of Present Celebrations], *Minfeng* 2, no. 3, 22. *Minfeng*, based in Shanghai, was an internationalist anarchist periodical published by Lu Jianbo. Reflecting Lu’s transnational vision, the journal regularly carried international anarchist news as well as anarchist analyses of China’s revolution.
[11] “Yinshou Minfeng zazhi bei ju” 《印售民锋杂志被拘》 [Individuals Printing and Selling *Minfeng* magazine Arrested], *Sin Wan Pao* 《新闻报》, 4 June 1927, 3. The story described herein the local news section for Suzhou in Sin Wan Pao concerned the arrest of one Shao Xiaomo for printing, selling, and mailing copies of *Minfeng*. It appears local authorities were tipped off to Shao’s actions and investigated. The police report specifically cited *Minfeng*’s status as an anarchist propaganda organ when investigating all involved. Since Shao was using the premises of the Xiaoshuo Lin Society 小说林社, the leader and followers of the group were rounded up as well. However, after interrogation, all but Shao Xiaomo were released.
[12] Censorship of anarchist movements and publications was not just limited to the GMD. There are numerous instances of censorship orders going out from the GMD and other various governments regarding anarchist publications. Jail time and execution were also not uncommon. Zheng Peigang, an influential anarchist first associated with Shifu’s *Minsheng* group in Guangzhou and Shanghai in the1910s, spent most of 1919 in jail for his anarchist activities. Prior to this stint in jail, he helped edit, print, and distribute journals like *Ziyoulu* 《自由录》 [*Record of Freedom*], a Beijing-based publication of the *Shi she* 实社 [Reality Society] and *Jinhua* 《进化》 [*Progress*], which was an early vehicle for Chen Yannian (1898–1927), Chen Duxiu’s son. Early in 1919, Beijing authorities cracked down on anarchist movements, stripped the mailing privileges of Zheng’s group, and terminated publication of *Jinhua*. Zheng was imprisoned shortly after the May 4th incident and interrogated for information regarding anarchist groups in Beijing. Throughout the 1920s, there were numerous notices issued in government publications regarding the prohibition of journals, newspapers, and other publications regarded as anarchist.
[13] This is not to say the Chinese and English-language presses in China did not report on the Sacco and Vanzetti case. There were numerous stories in English-language papers like the *North China Herald* and others. Further, there was widespread acknowledgment of worldwide protests on the two Italian anarchists’ behalf. It goes without saying that Chinese anarchist publications covered the impending executions and international movements to stay their executions. For many Chinese anarchists, the global impact of the Sacco and Vanzetti Defense Commission directly related to how they perceived of themselves as international anarchists and to what ends should their actions take. Ba Jin was one such anarchist who profoundly felt the influence of Sacco and Vanzetti’s case, even going so far as inspiring him to write to Bartolomeo Vanzetti. See Chapter 2 for further discussion of how Ba Jin formed international bonds through his participation in efforts to free Sacco and Vanzetti. For general overviews of the Sacco and Vanzetti case and its global importance, Paul Avrich’s *Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background* (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991) is a standard. Also see, Lisa McGirr, “The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti: A Global History,” *Journal of American History* 93, no. 4 (March 2007), 1085–1115 for a specific examination of the efforts and activities of the Sacco and Vanzetti Defense Committee.
[14] Dongyoun Hwang, *Anarchism in Korea: Independence, Transnationalism, and the Question of National Development, 1919–1984* (Albany: SUNY Press, 2016) is a great recent study that details interactions between Korean and Chinese anarchists. See Chapter 2 for an extended look at Sino-Korean anarchist efforts.
[15] “Wuzhengfu dang san ri ren hua pan chu” 《无政府党三日人华判出》 [Three Japanese Anarchists Deported], *Sin Wan Pao*, 28 December 1927, 4. Also see a 21 November 1928 8 story, “Riben wuzhengfudang nibang ri Shitian lingshi zhi piao” 《日本无政府党拟绑日失田领事之票》 [Japanese Anarchists’ Attempt to Ransom Japanese Consul-General Yada], also from the *Sin Wan Pao*, about a foiled plot by Japanese anarchists to kidnap Yada Shichitaro, the Japanese consul-general, and the head of the Yokohama Specie Bank and ransom them for money to buy explosives. For an overview of Japanese consular police activities against anarchists and radicals in China, see Erik Esselstrom, *Crossing Empire’s Edge: Foreign Ministry Police and Japanese Expansionism in Northeast Asia* (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008), Chapter 3.
[16] “Riben youju faxian e wei huipiao” 《日本邮局发现额伪汇票》 [Japanese Post Office Discovers Numerous Counterfeit Bills of Exchange], *Shibao*, 28 May 1928, 3.
[17] Chinese Anarchist Youth Federation, “Declaracion de la Federación de jovenes anarquistas de Chino,” *La Revista Blanca*, 15 October 1927, 319–320. The paper gives the date of the original declaration as August 1, 1927. This would have appeared in *Minfeng*, which was the journal for the group. The copy in *WSZX* has the manifesto appearing in *Minfeng*, vol. 2, nos. 4–5, September 1927.
[18] A well-written English-language biography is Nick Heath, “Lu Jianbo 卢剑波 (1904–1991)”, *Libcom.org*, 24 January 2014, [[https://libcom.org/history/lu-jianbo-%E5%8D%A2%E5%89%A3%E6%B3%A2-1904-1991][libcom.org]].
[19] Chinese Anarchist Youth Federation, “Declaracion de los Jovenes Anarquistas Chinos,” *Avante*, no. 1, 5 November 1927,3; and “Dichiarazione degli Anarchici della Federazione Giovanile Cinese,” *L’Emancipazione*, no. 5, 11 November 1927, p. 1.
[20] Jesse Cohn, “Traces of *Revista Única*: Appearances and Disappearances of Anarchism in Steubenville, 19091973”, in *Writing Revolution*, Christopher J. Castañeda and Montse Feu, eds. (Urbana and Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 2019), 163; and Jorell Melendez Badillo, “The Anarchist Imaginary: Max Nettlau and Latin America, 1890–1934”, *Writing Revolution*, 182.
[21] Lu’s responses to the initial survey appeared in the 19 July 1927 edition of *La Protesta*, a weekly anarchist journal founded in 1903. Personal communication with Jesse Cohn, 18 January 2020.
[22] A. C. Graham, *The Disputers of the T’ao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China* (Chicago and LaSalle, IL: Open Court Press, 1989): 3–4. Though Graham allows that some ‘theoretical anarchisms’ existed within various philosophical positions, such schema always presupposed an overriding hierarchy to which individuals would act in accordance (p. 302). It must also be remembered that Laozi 老子 (c. 6th Century BCE) vision of an ideal society was that in which the inhabitants of a particular state, no matter how tempted by the attractions of the outside, would never leave their small, quiet worlds: “Though adjoining states are within sight of one another, and the sound of dogs barking and cocks crowing in one state can be heard in another, yet the people of one state will grow old and die without having had any dealings with those of another.”{1}
{1} See Laozi, *The Tao Te Ching*, trans. D. C. Lau, (London: Penguin, 1963), Ch. LXXX, 87.
[23] Historian John Fitzgerald has characterized state-building as the preoccupation of all would be reformers and radicals, both on the left and right. He even characterizes the arguments of early Chinese anarchists, such as Wu Zhihui 吴稚晖 (1865–1953), Li Shizeng 李石曾 (1881–1973), and Liu Shipei 刘师培 (1884–1919) as premised on the maintenance of some form of state, albeit a ‘state’ based on the people rather than a state founded on the prerogative a ruling class. John Fitzgerald, *Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution* (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 76. Mao Zedong 毛泽东 (1893–1976) held the state reflected class interests and until class as both concept and identity ceased to exist, too saw the immediate goals of the CCP as the construction of a (proletarian) state. Peter Zarrow, *After Empire: The Conceptual Transformation of the Chinese State, 1885–1924* (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 288–289.
[24] Rebecca Karl, *Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century* (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002), 171–172.
[25] Leela Gandhi, *Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siecle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship* (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 27–32. In the context of affinities Indian nationalists and revolutionaries forged with Europeans and Americans who belonged to communities marginalized by Western social norms, Gandhi argues that their friendships rested on a politics of utopian possibility, of finding community beyond the limits of the nation state. In a similar sense, anarchists, as marginalized revolutionaries, could, by this status, reach across racial, class, and imperial lines to form friendships on the basis of their shared belief and adherence to the radical possibilities of anarchist practice.
[26] Ge Mouchun, Jiang Jun, and Li Xingyi, in an appendix to their anthology on Chinese anarchist writings list over 100 Chinese anarchist groups in existence from 1907 to 1940, and at least 140 anarchist periodicals and publications during the same period. However, the majority of these groups formed during the 1920s. This count is difficult due to the often-brief existence of groups and publications, but I believe further examination of Chinese-language anarchist materials would only revise the count upwards. See *WSZX*, 1059–1087.
[27] Kenyon Zimmer, “Positively Stateless: Marcus Graham, the Ferrero-Sallitto Case, and Anarchist Challenges to Race and Deportation,” in *The Rising Tide of Color: Race, State Violence, and Radical Movements across the Pacific*, ed. Moon-Ho Jung (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014), 137.
[28] George Woodcock, *Anarchism* (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009); James Joll, *The Anarchists* (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1964); and Alex Butterworth, *The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists, and Secret Agents* (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010).
[29] Some flavors of anarchism include anarcho-communism, anarcho-individualism, anarcho-syndicalism, green anarchism, anarcho-pacifism, anarcho-feminism, post-anarchism, and so on. Discussions on what counts as anarchism have invariably been an often-contentious feature within anarchist communities. For a clear synopsis of the alphabet soup of anarchism, see Ruth Kinna, *Anarchism: A Beginner’s Guide* (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2005), 15–26.
[30] Some examples include Murray Boochkin, *The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years, 1968–1936* (Oakland: AK Press, 2001); Paul Avrich, *The Russian Anarchists* (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967); Nunzio Pernicone, *Italian Anarchism, 1864–1892*; and David Berry, *A History of the French Anarchist Movement, 1917 to 1945* (Oakland: AK Press, 2009).
[31] Constance Bantman and Bert Altena, eds., *Reassessing the Transnational Turn: Scales of Analysis in Anarchist and Syndicalist Study* (New York: Routledge, 2015).
[32] David Turcato, “Italian Anarchism as a Transnational Movement, 1885–1915,” *International Review of Social History* 52, no. 3 (2007): 407–444.
[33] Turcato, 412–415.
[34] Kirwin Shaffer, “Latin Lines and Dots: Transnational Anarchism, Regional Networks, and Italian Libertarians in Latin America, *Zapruder World* 1 (2014), accessed June 10, 2016, [[http://www.zapruderworld.org/content/kirwin-rshaffer-latin-lines-and-dots-transnational-anarchism-regional-networks-and-italian][www.zapruderworld.org]]; and Constance Bantman, “Internationalism without an International? Cross-Channel Anarchist Networks, 1880–1914,” *Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire* 84, no. 4 (2006): 961–981; and *The French Anarchists in London, 1880–1914: Exile and Transnationalism in the First Globalization* (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013).
[35] Shaffer, paras. 3–5.
[36] Claudio Lomnitz, *The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón* (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2014); David Dorado Romo, *Ringside Seat to a Revolution: An Underground Cultural History of El Paso and Juarez, 1893–1923* (El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press, 2005); and Jose C. Moya, *Cousins and Strangers: Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires, 1850–1930* (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) are but three examples of the border crossing within radical circles in Latin America. See Geoffroy de Laforcade and Kirwin Shaffer, eds., *In Defiance of Boundaries: Anarchism in Latin American History* (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015), especially Chapters 1–4 for further examples.
[37] Kenyon Zimmer, Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchists in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015).
[38] Another example of how anarchism served as a social bedrock in immigrant communities would be essays by Tom Goyens, Kenyon Zimmer, Marcella Bencivenni, and Christopher J. Castañeda in Tom Goyens, Ed., *Radical Gotham: Anarchism in New York City from Schwab’s Saloon to Occupy Wall Street* (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017).
[39] George Woodcock’s *Anarchism* and James Joll’s *The Anarchists* are but two prominent examples. Other examples include Paul Avrich, *Anarchist Portraits* (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), which is a collection of short biographical sketches including ones on Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Proudhon. Also see Avrich, *Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman* (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2012); Martin A. Miller, *Kropotkin* (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); and George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumovic, *The Anarchist Prince: A Biographical Study of Peter Kropotkin* (New York and London: T.V. Boardman, 1950) for a few significant examples. Peter Marshall, *Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism* (Oakland: PM Press, 2010) combines the two trends with chapters on anarchist movements within specific countries and biographies of key anarchist thinkers.
[40] Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt, *Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism* (Edinburgh and Oakland: AK Press, 2009), 15–19. Schmidt and van der Walt’s work is controversial within anarchist circles for a variety of reasons. Two of the foremost include their attempt to frame anarchosyndicalism as the main current of anarchism and in so doing significantly restrict who and what is considered anarchist. The other, and perhaps more inflammatory reason, has been the recent revelation of Michael Schmidt’s white nationalist beliefs. A currently available PDF download on Libcom.org, a large online forum devoted to anarchist discussion, includes a disclaimer which notes that “we are not aware of such [white nationalist] themes in this work but readers should be advised.” See “Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism – Lucien van der Walt and Michael Schmidt,” *Libcom.org*, 3 June 2012, [[https://libcom.org/library/][libcom.org]] black-flame-volume-1-lucien-van-der-walt-michael-schmidt. Also see statements by the Instituto de Teoria e História Anarquista/Institute for Anarchist Theory and History (ITHA/IATH), “2017 ITHA/IATH Statement on Michael Schmidt Case”, *ITHA-IATH*, 23 March 2017, [[https://ithanarquista.wordpress.com/2017/03/23/2017statement-on-michael-schmidt-case-declaracao-sobre-o-caso-michael-schmidt/][ithanarquista.wordpress.com]], and Lucien van der Walt, “2017 Statement on Michael Schmidt Affair,” *ITHA-IATH*, 11 April 2017, [[https://ithanarquista.wordpress.com/2017/04/11/][ithanarquista.wordpress.com]] lucien-van-der-walt-2017-statement-on-michael-schmidt-affair-10-april-2017/
[41] Kathy E. Ferguson, “Anarchist Printers and Presses: Material Circuits of Politics,” *Political Theory* 42, no. 4 (2014): 391–414.
[42] Matthew Adams, “The Possibilities of Anarchist History: Rethinking the Canon and Writing History,” *Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies*, no. 1 (2013): 33–63. Iain McKay, “Sages and Movements: An Incomplete Peter Kropotkin Bibliography,” *Anarchist Studies* 22, no. 1 (2014): 66–101.
[43] David Novak, “Anarchism and Individual Terrorism,” *The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne d’Economique et de Science politique* 20, no. 2 (May 1954): 182. Novak’s argument runs that ultimately, anarchism is a philosophy of liberation and peace. It is dedicated to the salvation of humanity. It aims to save all humans. So, why is it acceptable for anarchists to plant bombs and plan assassinations? Novak sees these actions in contradiction with anarchism’s stated goals and brings to task figures such as Kropotkin, Berkman, and Goldman for their acceptance of terror inspiring activities. However, others countered that anarchism was an ideology based in purity and saw no contradictions in using extreme measures to obtain anarchist ideals. David Wieck, “The Negativity of Anarchism,” *Interrogations: Revue Internationale de Recherche Anarchiste*, no. 5(Dec 1975): 17–18, *Quadrant 4*, accessed 15 September 2020, [[http://quadrant4.org/anarchism.html][quadrant4.org]]. An example of anarchist histories that develop themes of martyrdom and oppression include Paul Avrich, *The Haymarket Tragedy* (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).
[44] Tom Goyens, *Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City, 1880–1914*. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007).
[45] Benjamin Schwartz, *In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West* (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1964); Chow Tse-Tsung, *The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China* (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960).
[46] Lin Yusheng, *The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Anti-Traditionalism in the May Fourth Era* (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), Chs. 1–2.
[47] Joshua Fogel and Peter Zarrow, *Imagining the People: Chinese Intellectuals and the Concept of Citizenship, 18901920* (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997),
[48] Robert Scalapino and George T. Yu, *The Chinese Anarchist Movement* (Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, University of California, 1961); Martin Bernal, *Chinese Socialism to 1907* (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976); Michael Gasster, *Chinese Intellectuals and the Revolution of 1911* (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969); and Chow Tse-tsung, *The May Fourth Movement* are among the earliest academic works to seriously consider the impact of anarchism and anarchist movements in China.
[49] Lydia H. Liu, Rebecca E. Karl., and Dorothy Ko, eds., *The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory* (New York: Columbia University, 2013), see “Introduction” and “Historical Context” for ways in which anarchist discourse contributed to discussions of new concepts in China.
[50] Marilyn Levine, *The Found Generation: Chinese Communists during the Twenties* (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993), 6 and 30–31.
[51] Justin Ritzinger, “Dependent Co-Evolution: Kropotkin’s Theory of Mutual Aid and Its Appropriation by Chinese Buddhists,” *Chung-Hwa Buddhist Journal* 26 (2013): 89–112.
[52] Arif Dirlik, *Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution* (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), Chs. 5–6 provides an extensive overview of anarchism’s place in both the CCP and GMD.
[53] Ming K. Chan and Arif Dirlik, *Schools into Fields and Factories* provides an excellent overview of anarchist involvement in Chinese experiments with progressive education. Also see, Yeh, *The Alienated Academy* for another take on radicalism in education.
[54] See Peter Zarrow, *Anarchism in Chinese Political Culture* (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), and Dirlik, *Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution*.
[55] John Fitzgerald, *Awakening China*; Henrietta Harrison, *The Making of a Republican Citizen* (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
[56] Prasenjit Duara, *Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900–1942* (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 149–152.
[57] Prasenjit Duara, “Transnationalism and the Predicament of Sovereignty: China, 1900–1945”, *American Historical* *Review* 102, no. 4 (1997): 1030–1051; “Transnationalism in the Era of Nation-States: China, 1900–1945”, *Development and Change* 29, no. 4 (1998): 647–670; and “Nationalism and Transnationalism in the Globalization of China”, *China Report* 39, no. 1 (2003): 1–19.
[58] Rebecca Karl, *Staging the World*, 102–106.
[59] Wang Gungwu, “A Single Chinese Diaspora?” in *Diasporic Chinese Ventures: The Life and Works of Wang Gungwu*, eds. Gregor Benton and Hong Liu (London and New York: Routledge Curzon, 2004), 157–177; and Leander Seah, “Conceptualizing the Chinese World: Jinan University, Nanyang Migrants, and Trans-Regionalism, 1900–1941” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2011), ProQuest (3462170), 20–22.
[60] Adam McKeown, “Conceptualizing Chinese Diasporas, 1842–1949,” *Journal of Asian Studies* 58, no. 2 (1999): 306–337.
[61] Seah, 23–25.
[62] This point is argued by Philip A. Kuhn, *Chinese among Others: Emigration in Modern Times* (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008).
[63] See Torsten Weber, *Embracing ‘Asia’ in China and Japan: Asianism Discourse and the Contest for Hegemony, 1912–1933* (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018); Craig Smith, “Chinese Asianism in the Early Republic: Guomindang Intellectuals and the Brief Internationalist Turn”, *Modern Asian Studies*, 53, no. 2 (2019): 594–596 and 600–604; Craig Smith, “China as Leader of the Weak and Small: The *Ruoxiao* Nations and Guomindang Nationalism”, *Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review*, 6, no. 2 (2017): 537–542, and Anna Belogurova, *The Nanyang Revolution: The Comintern and Chinese Networks in Southeast Asia, 1890–1957* (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Reto Hofmann and Daniel Hedinger, “Axis Empires: Towards a Global History of Fascist Imperialism,” *Journal of Global History* 12, no. 2 (2017): 161–165; Daniel Hedinger,, “The Spectacle of Global Fascism: The Italian Blackshirt Mission to Japan’s Asian Empire,” *Modern Asian Studies* 51, no. 6 (2017): 1999–2034; Max Ward, “Displaying the Worldview of Japanese Fascism: The Tokyo Thought War Exhibition of 1938,” *Critical Asian Studies* 47, no. 3 (2015): 414–439; Tom Buchanan, “‘The Dark Millions in the Colonies are Unavenged’: Anti-Fascism and Anti-Imperialism in the 1930s,” *Contemporary European History* 25, no. 4 (2016): 645–665; and Kasper Braskén, “Making Anti-Fascism Transnational: The Origins of Communist and Socialist Articulations of Resistance in Europe, 1923–1924,” *Contemporary European History* 25, no. 4 (2016): 573–596. as but a few examples.
[64] Gandhi, 27–32.
[65] Rebecca E. Karl, “Creating Asia: China in the World at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century.” *The American Historical Review* 103, no. 4 (1998): 1096–1118. Also see Arif Dirlik, “Anarchism and the Question of Place: Thoughts from the Chinese Experience,” in *Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Post-Colonial World, 1870–1940: The Praxis of National Liberation, Internationalism and Social Revolution*, Steve Hirsch and Lucien Van der Walt, eds. (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 131–146.
[66] Gotelind Müller-Saini, “Thinking Globally, Acting Locally: Chinese Anarchists between National and International Concerns (1900-1930s),” in *Global Conjectures: China in Transnational Perspective*, eds. William C. Kirby, Mechthild Leutner, and Klaus Mühlhahn (Munich: LIT Verlag, 2006), 103–120; and “Chinese Anarchism and ‘Glocalization’,” *Bochumer Jahrbuch zur Ostasienforschung* 29(2005): 223–234.
[67] Gergor Benton, *Chinese Migrants and Internationalism: Forgotten Histories, 1917–1945* (London and New York: Routledge, 2007) explores the scope of Chinese involvement in left-wing internationalist causes but does not really delve into any personal connections or networks Chinese participants may have established. More recently, however, Richard Jean So, *Trans-Pacific Community: The Rise and Fall of a Cultural Network* (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016) looks at the connections between and among Agnes Smedley and Ding Ling, Pearl Buck and Lin Yutang, Paul Robeson and Liu Liangmo, and Lao She and Ida Pruitt to explore the kinds of internationalist politics and cultural production that occurred in the 30s and 40s.
[68] Here I particularly have in mind Zimmer’s discussion of San Francisco’s multi-ethnic anarchist scene. See Zimmer, *Immigrants Against the State*, 94–106.
[69] An example to work towards would be Goyens’s study of the social spaces inhabited by German anarchists in late nineteenth-century New York, See Goyens, *Beer and Revolution*, 34–51 for an overview of how immigrant German anarchists utilized beer halls as a social space through which to organize their activities.
[70] Yeh Wen-hsin, “Middle Country Radicalism: The May Fourth Movement in Hangzhou.” Also see her *Provincial Passages: Culture, Space, and the Origins of Chinese Communism* (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
[71] See Dongyoun Hwang, “Beyond Independence: The Korean Anarchist Press in China and Japan in the 1920s and 1930s,” *Asian Studies Review* 31, no. 1 (2007): 3–23; and “Korean Anarchism Before 1945: A Regional and Transnational Approach,” in *Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Post-Colonial World, 1870–1940: The Praxis of National Liberation, Internationalism and Social Revolution*, Steve Hirsch and Lucien Van der Walt, eds. (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 95–129.
[72] Zimmer, *Immigrants against the State*, 182–183.
[73] Yamaguchi Mamoru 山口守, “Cong zazhi ‘Pingdeng’ kan wuzhengfuzhuyi sixiang kongjian de yuejingxing: Yi Ba Jin yu Liu Zhongshi de shujian wei zhongxin” 《从杂志〈平等〉看无政府主义思想空间的越境性：以巴金于刘 忠士的书简为中心》[*Pingdeng*, A Case of Anarchism’s Border Crossing: A Study of Ba Jin’s Letters to Liu Zhongshi], *Xiandai Zhongwen xuekan* 5, no. 32 (2014): 30–38.
[74] Hwang, “Korean Anarchism before 1945,” 116.
[75] See Sakai Hirobumi 坂井洋史, “Ba Jin yu Fujian Quanzhou” 《巴金与福建泉州》 [Ba Jin and Quanzhou, Fujian] in *Ba Jin de Shijie* 《巴金的世界》 [Ba Jin’s World], eds. Yamaguchi Mamoru and Sakai Hirobumi (Beijing: Dongfang chubanshe, 1995), 252–315.
[76] Mitch Miller, “Chinese Anarchists in the U. S.,” Libcom.org, [[https://libcom.org/forums/north-america/chineseanarchists-in-the-u-s][libcom.org]], accessed September 30, 2016.
[77] Jiang Jun, “Lu Jianbo xiansheng zaonian de wuzhengfuzhuyi xuanchuan huodong” 《卢剑波先生早年的无政府主义宣传活动》[Mr. Lu Jianbo’s Early Anarchist Propaganda Activities], in *Wuzhengfuzhuyi sixiang ziliao xuan* 《无政府主义思想资料选》[Selections in Anarchist Thought], eds. Ge Maochun, Jiang Jun, and Chen Xingzhi (Beijing: Beijing Daxue chubanshe, 1984), 1019.
[78] Zimmer, *Immigrants Against the State*, 182–183.
[79] David Scott, *Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment* (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
[80] Scott, 4.
[81] Turcato, 425–428.
[82] See Andrew Hoyt, “Active Centers, Creative Elements, and Bridging Nodes: Applying the Vocabulary of Network Theory to Radical History,” *Journal for the Study of Radicalism* 9, no. 1 (2015): 33–38. Also see his “Methods for Tracing Radical Networks: Mapping the Print Culture and Propagandists of the Sovversivi,” in *Without Borders or Limits: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Anarchist Studies*, eds. Jorrell A. Meléndez Badillo and Nathan Jun (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013), 75–106; “And They Called Them ‘Galleanisti’: The Rise of the *Cronaca Sovversiva* and the Formation of America’s Most Infamous Anarchist Faction (1895–1912)” (PhD Dissertation, University of Minnesota, 2018).
[83] Fabio Lanza, *Beyond the Gate: Inventing Students in China* (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 7
[84] Jiang Jun, 114–120.
[85] Paul Avrich, *Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America* (Oakland and Edinburgh: AK Press, 2005), 168. Jones’s English abilities were said to have been limited, but he evidently knew enough to interact with San Francisco’s multiethnic anarchist scene. Ba Jin and Lu Jianbo both had some form of English education.
[86] Angel Pino, “Ba Jin as Translator,” Angel Pino, “Ba Jin as Translator,” in *Modern China and the West:* *Translation and Cultural Mediation*, eds. Hsiao-yen Peng and Isabelle Rabout (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 36–40. According to Pino’s research, Ba Jin also knew German and Russian. In the late 1940s, he expressed interest in learning Yiddish and had asked Rudolf Rocker for a Yiddish edition of his works. See Chapter 6, starting around n. 109 for further details. Lu Jianbo corresponded extensively with Spanish-language anarchists. Both Ba Jin and Lu Jianbo were well-known Esperantists.
[87] Ba Jin, Yijian xinbian《失简新编》 [Ba Jin’s Lost Letters] (Zhengzhou: Daxiang Renwu Chubanshe, 2003).
[88] The known archives containing Ba Jin’s correspondence include the Joseph A. Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan, the Houghton Library at Harvard, the Center for International Anarchist Research in Lausanne, Switzerland, the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, and his former residence in Shanghai, the *Ba Jin guju* 巴金故居.
[89] From the 1930s on, Lu Jianbo worked as a professor at Sichuan National University, but he maintained his connections with Ray Jones so as to procure books for his translation and teaching work. The results of this exchange of materials cannot only be seen in Lu’s later attempts to re-establish an anarchist scene in China in the late 1940s, they can also be seen in the textbooks and scholarly work he produced on Greece, Rome, and Esperanto. See Qi Ya’nan and Luo Yihe, “Lu Jianbo: Ba Jin yan zhong de Zhongguo ‘Gandi’” 《卢剑波——巴金眼中的中国甘地》 [Lu Jianbo: China’s Gandhi in Ba Jin’s Eyes”, *Chengdu Ribao*, 13 Feb 2012.
[90] Lu Jianbo corresponded with Ma Schmu in the 1960s. Ma Schmu is another ‘bridging node’ between Chinese and other anarchist communities. He even served to bridge the older generations of Ba Jin and Lu Jianbo with younger ones. See Chapter 7 for further details.
[91] See Chapter 5, n. 96.
[92] See *Quan guo bao kan suo yin* 全国报刊索引 [[http://www.cnbksy.cn/home][www.cnbksy.cn]]. Unless otherwise noted, Chineselanguage anarchist periodicals come from this digitized collection.
[93] However, even though issues of *Pingdeng* as well as Ray Jones’s later *Wuzhengfugongchan yuekan* 《无政府共产月刊》, or *Anarcho-Communist Monthly,* are also collected in Ray Jones’s papers at the Ethnic Studies Library at Berkeley, the Shanghai National Library’s collection is more complete. For surviving physical editions of Pingshe materials, see the Ray Jones Papers, Asian American Studies Collections, Ethnic Studies Library, University of California, Berkeley.
[94] See “Lidiap”, *Bibliothek de Freien*, 1 November 2019, [[https://bibliothekderfreien.de/bestaende/lidiap/][bibliothekderfreien.de]]. For an overview of the place of libraries and archives in anarchist practice, see Jessica Moran, “To Spread the Revolution: Anarchist Archives and Libraries,” in *Information Agitation: Library and Information Skills in Social Justice Movements and Beyond*, ed. Melissa Morrone (Sacramento: Library Juice Press, 2014), 173–184. This essay is posted online at the *Kate Sharpley Library*, accessed 29 August 2020, [[https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/7sqwg0][www.katesharpleylibrary.net]].
[95] Some examples of the journals they corresponded with are *Freedom* (UK), *La Revista Blanca* (Spain), *Tierra y Libertad* (Spain and Mexico), *Ruta* (Venezuela), *The Road to Freedom* (US), *Avante* (Mexico), *L’Adunata dei Refrattari* (US), and *Le Reveil/Il Risveglio* (Switzerland), and *Le Libertaire* (France). More than likely Ba Jin wrote to these journals in either English, French, or Esperanto, while Lu Jianbo wrote in either English, Spanish, or Esperanto. See Pino, “Ba Jin as Translator,” 38. Also see Avrich, *Anarchist Voices*, 398 for a reminiscence from Cuban anarchist Marcelo Salinas on receiving letters in French from Ba Jin. Currently, the only existing example of a letter Ba Jin directly wrote in French is the one he sent to the Commission des Relations Internationales (CRIA) in 1949. Ba Jin, “Letter from Ba Jin to the CRIA [International Anarchist Liaison Commission, Paris], 18 March 1949,” *Kate Sharpley Library*, last accessed 27 August 2020, [[http://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/15dvhn][www.katesharpleylibrary.net]].
[96] The role of digitization in the aid of producing anarchist histories is something taken up by Kenyon Zimmer and others, including Latin Americanist, Laura Putnam. Zimmer admits to the ways in which digital collections aid in researching diffuse transnational movements like those of anarchists, but also cautions researchers as to the ways search methods employed by digital collections can obscure certain aspects of anarchist experience and elide more ephemeral voices. See Kenyon Zimmer, “Archiving the American Anarchist Press: Reflections on Format, Accessibility, and Language”, *American Periodicals: A Journal of History and Criticism* 29, no. 1 (2019): 9–11, and Laura Putnam, “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows they Cast”, *American Historical Review* 121, no. 2 (2016): 377–402 and issues raised in n. 82 in Chapter 5. Also see Montse Feu, “Recovering Spanish-Language Anarchist Periodicals: Thoughts on Silences, Identities, Access, and Affective Engagement,” *American Periodicals: A Journal of History and Criticism* 29, no. 1 (2019): 14–15 for Feu’s personal reflections on how digital sources shaped her sensorial experience of researching Spanish anarchist exiles in the US.
[97] Yamaguchi Mamoru and Sakai Hirobumi, *Ba Jin de shijie* 《巴金的世界》 [Ba Jin’s World] (Beijing: Dongfang chubanshe, 1995).
[98] Pino, “Ba Jin as Translator,” 43–50 discusses Ba Jin’s attitudes on translation. Also see a series of articles Pino wrote for a special edition of the online journal, *A contretemps: Bulletin de critique bibliographique*, on Ba Jin as anarchist and translator: [[http://acontretemps.org/spip.php?rubrique86][acontretemps.org]]
[99] See Ramnath, *Decolonizing Anarchism*, 1–9 for an example of a scholar who is both academic and activist and how these identities influence the ways in which she understands and researches anarchist practice.
[100] Liming Vocational University 黎明职业大学 is the current-day incarnation of the anarchist-run Liming Advanced Middle School that Ba Jin visited in the 1930s. In addition to housing a Ba Jin Research center, the university also holds yearly commemorations and research conferences on the author. It regularly makes us of Ba Jin’s connection to the campus as a branding mechanism. See Chapter 4, n. 25.
[101] Li Guangcun, “Zheshe xinling de duo lengjing—bianhou xuyu,” 《折射心灵的多棱镜——编后絮语》 [Refracting the Prisms of the Soul—Some Postface Meanderings], *Yijian xinbian*, 266–272.
[102] Qi Ya’nan and Luo Yihe, “Lu Jianbo: Ba Jin yan zhong de Zhongguo ‘Gandi.’”
[103] See Emma Goldman to Ba Jin, 26 May 1927, reel 18/271, Emma Goldman Papers Project.
[104] See Hoyt, “Methods for Tracing Radical Networks: Mapping the Print Culture and Propagandists of the Sovversivi,” 90–101 for an example of tracing different networks formed by individuals and institutions.
[105] See Henry Yu’s ideas of the Cantonese Pacific and Adam McKeown’s conception of Chinese diasporas. Henry Yu, “The Intermittent Rhythms of the Cantonese Pacific” and Adam McKeown, “Conceptualizing Chinese Diasporas, 1842–1949.” For the promise and problems of cross-ethnic organizing in California, see Allison Varzally, *Making a Non-White America: Californians Coloring outside Ethnic Lines, 1925–1955* (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); and David M. Struthers, *The World in a City: Multiethnic Radicalism in Early TwentiethCentury Los Angeles* (Urbana and Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 2019).
[106] Jane Mee Wong, “Pingshe: Retrieving an Asian American Anarchist Tradition,” *Amerasia Journal* 34, no. 1 (2008): 139–143.
[107] Sakai Hirobumi, “Ba Jin yu Fujian” 《巴金与福建》 [Ba Jin and Fujian], in Yamaguchi Mamoru and Sakai Hirobumi, *Ba Jin de shijie* 《巴金的世界》 [Ba Jin’s World] (Beijing: Beijing University Press, 1995),
[108] Here I aim to take up from where Benedict Anderson’s *Under Three Flags* left off.
[109] Sakai, “Ba Jin yu Fujian,” 275–276. For discussions of how Liang’s educational philosophy, which was in part framed by his experience as an anarchist educator, is used in supporting Xi Jinping’s maritime Silk Road, see Chapter 4, starting around n. 84.
[110] See Anna Belogurova, “Introduction to ‘Naming Modernity: Rebranding and Neologisms during China’s Interwar Global Moment in East Asia’,” special issue, *Cross-Currents* 6, no. 2 (2017): 491–504; Oleksa Drachewych and Ian McKay, *Left Transnationalism: The Communist International and the National, Colonial, and Racial Questions* (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019); and Kasper Braskén, “Making Anti-Fascism Transnational: The Origins of Communist and Socialist Articulations of Resistance in Europe, 1923–1924,” *Contemporary European History* 25, no. 4 (2016): 573–596 for examples.
[111] See Gandhi, *Affective Communities*, 27.
[112] See Chapters 2, 4, and 6 for brief sketches on Kuang Husheng.
[113] The 70s Front was a loose, anarchist-ish left-wing collective formed in Hong Kong in the early 1970s in an explosion of radical movements that came in reaction to social and cultural changes in Hong Kong and spillover from the Cultural Revolution in the PRC. See “Group Profile: The 70s Front,” *Libero International*, no. 3 (1975), *Libcom.org*, 2 February 2020, [[http://libcom.org/library/group-profile-hong-kong-70s-front][libcom.org]]. The Chuang Collective sprung from a previous anarchist affiliated group, Nao 闹 that published on the anarchist open forum site, *Libcom.org*. Chuang’s website is [[http://chuangcn.org/][chuangcn.org]]. The Lausan Collective is an anarchist informed group that arose in the wake of the 2019 protests in Hong Kong against proposed extradition bill. Lausan’s website is [[https://lausan.hk/][lausan.hk]]. Both groups, while focused on leftwing issues in the Chinese-speaking world, aim to build a transnational leftist movement that eschews hierarchy. Their stories will be discussed further in the conclusion as potential afterlives of the historical networks examined in the main body of the dissertation.
[114] It is not to say that there were no anarchist organizations, international or otherwise. There was the International Working Men’s Association in Berlin, founded in 1922, which was an international congress for anarcho-syndicalist trade unions. There was also an International Anarchist Youth Group based in Amsterdam. Of course, there were also numerous national anarcho-syndicalist congresses, most notably the CGT in France and the CNT in Spain. Both were national anarcho-syndicalist trade union organizations built up through smaller regional and local groups. But, these organizations neither had the guiding role, nor the status as ‘official’ representative and policy maker that the Comintern had. For example, in the case of the CNT in Spain in the 1930s, there was also the para-organization, the Federación Anarquista Iberia (FAI), a collection of anarchist affinity groups, which was formed in response to perceived CNT moderation and pushed the CNT to take more radical actions. However, as anarcho-syndicalist unions that represented the workers, neither organized in such a way so as to engage in the revolutionary seizure of the state (though the CNT did later participate in government during the civil war). See Danny Evans, *Revolution and the State: Anarchism in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939)* (London: Routledge, 2018). For general histories of the CNT, see José Peirats Valls, *The CNT and the Spanish Revolution, Volume 1*, trans. Chris Ealham (Oakland: PM Press, 2011); Chris Ealham, *Living Anarchism: José Peirats and the Spanish Anarcho-Syndicalist Movement* (Oakland and Edinburgh: AK Press, 2015); David Berry explores the CGT and French anarcho-syndicalists in *A History of the French Anarchist Movement, 1917–1945* (Oakland and Edinburgh: AK Press, 2009).
[115] Turcato, “Italian Anarchism as a Transnational Movement,” 407–444.
[116] See Kirwin Shaffer, “Latin Lines and Dots,” and Bantman, “Internationalism without an International?”
[117] Here, we must remember that Chinese anarchists and anarchism in China began with international connections and were in constant contact and circulation with overseas Chinese communities and international figures. See Zarrow, Dirlik, and Scalapino and Yu’s examinations of early Chinese encounters with anarchism.
[118] Dongyoun Hwang makes a similar case for Korean anarchist activity. Korean anarchists were in constant circulation between Japan, China, and Korea and were always involved in building networks and societies with Japanese and Chinese anarchists. See Dongyoun Hwang, *Anarchism in Korea: Independence, Transnationalism, and the Question of National Development 1919–1984* (Albany: SUNY Press, 2016). Chinese connections to Korean anarchists will be discussed briefly later in this chapter, and again, more prominently in Chapter 4.
[119] Here, the aim is not to examine these networks and connections in terms of content, but in terms of direction and flow. The ‘who’ and the ‘where’ take precedence in terms of ‘what’. In this, this and subsequent chapters aim to examine the extent of Chinese anarchist activity materially, through correspondence and the dissemination of Chinese anarchist materials. As mentioned in the introduction this method is borrowed from Andrew Hoyt’s examination of Italian anarchism in North America through a ‘propaganda outward’ method. See Andrew D. Hoyt, “Hidden Histories and Material Culture: The Provenance of an Anarchist Pamphlet”, *Zapruder World* 1 (2014),; and Andrew D. Hoyt, “Methods for Tracing Radical Networks: Mapping the Print Culture and Propagandists of the Sovversivi”, in *Without Borders or Limits: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Anarchist Studies*, eds. Jorell A. Melendez Badillo and Nathan A. Jun (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013), 75–106 as models for the structure and ideas of this chapter.
[120] See Hoyt, “Hidden Histories and Material Culture” and Turcato, “Italian Anarchism as a Transnational Movement”.
[121] Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman are well known as anarchist propagandists operating in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During the 1919–1920 Red Scare, both were targeted by the US government and deported to Russia under the 1917 Espionage Act for their activities opposing conscription during the First World War. They both spent time in the Soviet Union during the early 1920s and quickly became disillusioned with the Soviet State and would become its vociferous critics. Thomas Keel was an influential anarchist propagandist and publisher, most noted for his 1910–1928 stint as editor for *Freedom*, the London-based anarchist journal co-founded in 1886 by Peter Kropotkin and Charlotte Wilson. Max Nettlau was a noted historian of anarchist movements whose own personal archives would later become a major holding for the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam.
[122] Bao Pu was a comrade of Ba Jin. He joined the Socialist Youth Group in Shanghai sometime in the 1920s. Studied in the Soviet Union during the mid-1920s and corresponded with Alexander Berkman in Russian. He came back and turned against the October Revolution and Soviet policies. Bao later served in the Republican government in the Soviet Embassy. He went to the United States in the late 1940s. Wei Huilin was originally from Shanxi. He was an active participant in May 4th related activities there. In the early 1920s, he would study at Waseda, and it was he who helped Ba Jin learn Japanese. Wei was as active in Shanghai anarchist circles upon his return to China and went with Ba Jin to France in 1927. He later, established a career as a sociologist, anthropologist, and ethnologist. Wei would move to Taiwan after the war and would later emigrate to the United States in 1973. Wu Kegang was from Shouxiang, Anhui province. He studied in France in the mid-1920s and was incredibly active and associated with Berkman, Goldman, and other international figures. Wu was deported from France for his anarchist activities in early 1927, but not before he helped arrange matters for the newly arrived Ba Jin and Wei Huilin. Upon returning to China, Wu taught at both the Shanghai Labor University and Liming Advanced Middle School in Quanzhou. After the war, Wu taught economics in Taiwan.
[123] Jones and Ba Jin’s relationship and the activities of the Pingshe group will be discussed briefly in a later section of this chapter and in more detail in Chapter 3.
[124] Ba Jin’s connections to Quanzhou and its afterlife will be outlined in greater depth in Chapter 4.
[125] Lu Jianbo’s career as an anarchist and his efforts in the publication of *Jingzhe* will be detailed further in Chapter 5. For a complete list of Ba Jin’s translations, see Pino, “Ba Jin as Translator.”
[126] Ba Jin’s relationship with Agnes Inglis will be discussed in further detail in Chapter 6.
[127] An important matter that deserves further discussion is the language through which Ba Jin communicated with his anarchist networks. Naturally, Ba Jin wrote in Chinese when communicating with Chinese comrades, but in writing to his European and American contacts, he mainly used English. In some cases, as in his letters to the CRIA in Paris, he used French. Esperanto was a language he could write as well, but most of his available foreign correspondence is in English.
[128] The main aim is to expand upon the work done by Zarrow and Dirlik in laying out the intellectual resources available to Chinese anarchists and how those resources were translated into an ideological revolutionary platform. Some efforts towards focusing on the day-to-day revolutionary activities of anarchists can be found in Ming K. Chan and Arif Dirlik, *Schools into Fields and Factories: Anarchists, the Guomindang, and the National Labor University in Shanghai, 1927–1932* (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1991). Tracing the practical activities of anarchists in China hopefully can complement the more theoretical and intellectual direction of other current studies. For such approaches, see Tom Marlin, “Anarchism and the Question of Practice: Ontology in the Chinese Anarchist Movement, 1919–1927,” *Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies* 2 (2013): 188–214.
[129] See Zhou Qihua, “Ba Jin yu Kelupaotejin 《巴金于克鲁泡特金》[Ba Jin and Kropotkin], *Weinan Shifan Daxue Xuebao* 25, no. 4 (2010): 62; and Lang, 43–47.
[130] Miller, 47–48, discusses the genesis Kropotkin’s desires to help society in light of his experiences at home and at school.
[131] Ba Jin, “Wo de younian” 《我的幼年》 [My Youth], in WSZX, 1003. It is interesting to note that Ba, in 1958, appended a postscript in which he acknowledged that as the ideology of a fervent bourgeois youth, anarchism served its purpose in broadening his horizons. However, anarchism was not the correct path, and that the anarchism he professed should only be seen as the earnest, if misguided, attraction of youth. See WSZX, 1007–1008.
[132] Ba Jin, “‘Yige fankangzhe de hua’ yizhe qianji” 《一个反抗者的话》译者前记 [Translator’s foreword to ‘Words of a Rebel’] (hereafter called “Foreword to *Words of a Rebel*”) in WPKZZ, 62. In actuality, Ba Jin took this quote Rudolf Rocker (1873–1958), a contemporary German anarchist. The quote is from Rocker’s preface to *The Conquest of Bread*, which Ba Jin also translated. For Rocker’s preface, see WPKZZ, 73.
[133] Ba Jin, “Foreword to *Words of a Rebel*,” 62.
[134] Lang, 44–45.
[135] Feigan, “Zenyang jianshe zhenzheng ziyou pingdeng de shehui” 《怎样建设真正自由平等的社会》[How to Build a Free and Equal Society], *WSZX*, 534.
[136] See *Rensheng* *zazhi*《人声杂志》 [Voice Magazine], vol. 2, 1921. [[http://www.cnbksy.com/][www.cnbksy.com]], accessed October 15, 2019.
[137] It is very important here to note that among Ba Jin’s anarchist writings, there are a number that deal with labor movements, specifically the IWW. This is an understudied aspect of Ba Jin’s anarchist writings compared to his more well-known translations of European and Latin American anarchists and his essays on anarchist commitment and organization. Furthermore, anarchist efforts to organize and build labor movements in China occupy a more minor position within the historiography than their intellectual endeavors. See Dirlik, *Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution*, 190–196.
[138] *Xuehui* ran from 1922 to 1925. Beijing-based and edited by Jing Meijiu, the journal was significant not only for its polemical articles, but also the large and varied types of translated writings that appeared in its pages. A distinctive example could be found in the 1923 serialization of a Chinese translation of the Afro-French anti-colonial novel, *Batouala*, by Rene Maran.
[139] *Xuehui*’s *xiao tongxin* section was message board by which anarchists all over China could exchange short messages or announcements. The *xiao tongxin* functioned in tandem with personal letter-based communication. Chinese anarchists would often use the board to inquire whether their regular postal-based letters were reaching their intended recipients. More importantly, the *xiaotongxin* provided a space for anarchists to post messages about the impending publication of new journals, make request for materials, and give address updates. In one case, anarchists even posted the Zhou Zuoren’s apartment address as that was where the blind Esperantist poet, Eroshenko was staying at the time. The *xiao tongxin* section was a regular feature in *Xuehui* for nearly the entirety of its run. It only ceased appearing sometime in the last few months.
[140] See Dirlik, *Anarchism in Chinese Revolution*, 236–238 for the briefest of rundowns of Ba Jin’s anarchist activities in the 1920s.
[141] Deng Mengxian was a regular contributor to *Xuehui* and often posted announcements about journals or happenings that took place at Huaguang Hospital in the journal’s *xiao tongxin* section.
[142] Lu Jianbo briefly describes his time living there and gives a who’s who roster of Chinese anarchists he interacted with at the hospital. See Jiang Jun, “Lu Jianbo xiansheng zaonian de wuzhengfuzhuyi xuanchuan huodong jishi” [An Account of Mr. Lu Jianbo’s Early Anarchist Propaganda Activities], in WSZX, 1015–1016.
[143] For a brief overview of the history of Lida, please see Feng Yongliang, “Kuang Husheng yu Lida xueyuan” 《匡互生与立达学园》[Kuang Husheng and Lida Academy], *Jiaoyu jia zhoukan* 1 (2011): 1–2, and Xiang Hongzhuan, “Lida xueyuan: Yi suo teli duxing de xuexiao” 《立达学园：一所特立独行的学校》[Lida Academy: An Independent and Unique School], *Zhong xiaoxue guanli* 11 (November 2009), 42–44..
[144] Ziyou Bookstore was an influential anarchist bookstore based in the French Concession. Ba Jin and his anarchist comrades used it as a base from which to publish and distribute *Pingdeng* and other anarchist tracts. A cursory glance at the book and materials listing pages in prominent Shanghai anarchist journals at the time showcases just how many anarchist titles were published by the store. The bookstore also received extra attention from the GMD authorities on occasion due to its anarchist identity. See Airu, “Ziyou shudian de yiduan xiaoshi” 《自由书店的一段小史》 [A Brief History of Ziyou Bookstore], *Ziyouyuekan*, vol. 1, no. 1 (1929): 4–8. See Chapter 3 for details. Kaiming bookstore, which specialized in books for young adults, was operated and affiliated with students and alumni of Lida. See Jing Xiuming “Shitan “Lida” pai sanwen” 《试论 “立达” 派散文》 [Discussion of the Li Da Group’s Essays], *Zhejiang shida xuebao* 3 (1994): 22–26.
[145] See John Rapp and Daniel Youd’s 2015 special edition of *Contemporary Chinese Thought* 46, no. 2, which was devoted entirely to Ba Jin’s published Anti-Marxist criticism for an overview of his range of published criticisms and translated criticisms of Marxism and Bolshevism.
[146] See Marilyn Levine, *The Found Generation*: *Chinese Communists in Europe during the Twenties* (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993) for an in depth look at the work-study program in France.
[147] Ba Jin describes meeting Berkman at a banquet held by the French anarchist journal, *Plus Loin* in 1927. He also relates this story to Emma Goldman. See Li Yaotang to Alexander Berkman, July 18, 1927, International Institute of Social History (IISH), Alexander Berkman Papers, ARCH00040.47and Li Yaotang to Emma Goldman, July 5, 2927, IISH, Emma Goldman Papers, ARCH00520.114.
[148] Angel Pino, “Ba Jin and the Arshinov Platform”, Libcom.org, [[https://libcom.org/history/ba-jin-%E2%80%9Carshinov-platform%E2%80%9D][libcom.org]]; also see Angel Pino, “Chen [Wu Kegang, ou Wu Yanghao], *Dictionaire des anarchists*, [[http://maitron-en-ligne.univ-paris1.fr/spip.php?article155392][maitron-en-ligne.univ-paris1.fr]], accessed 11/12/2019.
[149] Their debates over how anarchists in China should organize and partake in movements in activities were outlined in a series of essays entitled, “Wuzhengfu yu shijian wenti” 《无政府主义与实践问题》 [Anarchism and the Question of Practice]. This series of essays was written in France and sent back to the *Minzhong* group in Shanghai for publication. It was published as a standalone booklet prior to April 12, 1927 and the GMD-led White Terror.
[150] Ba Jin talks about joining the *Banyue* *she* in his memoirs, “Wo de younian”, *WSZX*, 1004–1008.
[151] Ibid., 1004. In the same section, Ba Jin states he also read a translation of Peter Kropotkin’s *An Appeal to the Young* and found it to be an eye-opening experience as well.
[152] Ibid.
[153] This phrase, “spiritual mother” 精神上的母亲, appears in Ba Jin’s 1935 reminiscence *Xinyang yu huodong* 《信仰与活动》 [Faith and Activities]. See Ba Jin, “Xinyang yu huodong”, as collected in the Emma Goldman Papers Project, reel 14/286-288, Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley. The Emma Goldman Papers Project, while still publishing, has encountered numerous financial difficulties. At some point, the materials have been digitized and can now be reached on the *Internet Archive*, [[https://archive.org/details/emmagoldmanpapers][archive.org]]. The project itself is a compilation that includes the holdings of various archives.
[154] For this date of 1921, see Lang, n. 28 to pp. 94–95. Also see Yamaguchi Mamoru, “Ba Jin yu Aima Gaodeman: 20 shiji 20 niandai guomin geming zhong de wuzhengfuzhuyi” 《巴金与爱玛高德曼：20 世纪 20 年代国民革命中的无政府主义》[Ba Jin and Emma Goldman: Anarchism in the National Revolution in the 1920s], in *Hei’an zhi guang: Ba Jin de shiji shouwang* 《黑暗之光：巴金的世纪守望》[A Light in Darkness: Ba Jin’s Century on Watch] (Shanghai: Fudan University Press, 2017), Kindle Edition for further updates about the correspondence and availabilities of letters. While the last known letter between Goldman and Ba Jin is from 1928, there is a small chance he continued to write her. There are numerous places in the correspondence that indicated missing letters. Moreover, after he returned to Shanghai from France in 1928, it is known he continued to correspond with overseas Chinese comrades.
[155] These letters are split across multiple archives, including the Emma Goldman Papers Project that were at UC Berkeley, the International Institute of Social History, and the Ba Jin Residence in Shanghai.
[156] Emma Goldman to Ba Jin, May 26, 1927, reel 18/270, Emma Goldman Papers Project.
[157] Emma Goldman to Ba Jin, September 28, 1927, reel 19/136, Emma Goldman Papers Project.
[158] In one instance, Goldman assuaged Ba Jin’s fears that his class background prevented him from being a revolutionary anarchist who could connect to the oppressed and downtrodden masses. See Emma Goldman to Ba Jin, November 11, 1927, reel 19/256, Emma Goldman Papers Project.
[159] Emma Goldman to Ba Jin, September 28, 1927, reel 19/136, Emma Goldman Papers Project.
[160] Emma Goldman to Ba Jin, May 26, 1927, reel 18/269 and Emma Goldman to Ba Jin, September 28, 1927, reel 19/136, and also see Ba Jin to Emma Goldman, July 5, 1927, reel 18/439, Emma Goldman Papers Project. Yamaguchi Mamoru feels that Ba Jin was specifically trying to arrange for Goldman to teach at the National Labor University in Shanghai. See Yamaguchi Mamoru, “guanyu IISH he CIRA suo zang zhi Ba Jin yingwen, fawen shujian,” 《关于 IISH 和 CIRA 所藏之巴金英文，法文书简》 [On Ba Jin’s English and French Letters Archived at the IISH and CIRA] in *Ba Jin de Shijie* 《巴金的世界》 [Ba Jin’s World] (Beijing: Dongfang chubanshe, 1995), 157.
[161] Liu Shixin and Liang Bingxian were both involved with Shifu’s *Minsheng* group in the 1910s (Liu Shixin was Shifu’s brother) and were invited by Chen Jiongming around 1919 to participate in his revolutionary government in Fujian in Zhangzhou. For the next few years, the two, along with other anarchists set about transforming Zhangzhou into an anarchist city. However, they went too far in agitating against the ruling military faction and were forced to leave. See Liu Shixin’s recollections in Liu Shixin, “Guanyu wuzhengfuzhuyi huodong de diandi huiyi,” 《关于无政府主义活动的点滴回忆》 [Fragments of Memories about Anarchist Movements], in WXZX, 935–936.
[162] See *Minzhong*, no. 10, 1925, which was a “Special Edition on Russian Revolutionaries under Bolshevik Oppression”
[163] See *Minzhong*, no. 15, 1926 for a published exchange of letters between Ba Jin and French anarchist, Jean Grave, and *Minzhong*, vol. 2, nos. 4–5, 1927 for a published exchange of letters between Grave and Bi Xiushao.
[164] Actually, the first mentions of possibly inviting Goldman to China appear in *Minzhong*, no. 10, 1925, 532–533. The conversation is contextualized through a snippet of a letter she wrote to ‘some Chinese comrade’.
[165] See Goldman to Ba Jin, May 26, 1927. Taken from IISH, Emma Goldman Papers, ARCH00520.114.
[166] See Goldman to Ba Jin, April 24, 1928. Taken from IISH, Emma Goldman Papers, ARCH00520.114.
[167] For a brief synopsis of Jones’s life, see Paul Avrich, *Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America* (Edinburgh and Oakland: AK Press, 2005), 409–410.
[168] Ibid. Also see Him Mark Lai, Interview with Ray Jones, January 1, 1973, box 121, folder 22, Him Mark Lai Papers, Asian American Studies Archive, Ethnic Studies Library, University of California, Berkeley. Jane Mee Wong describes Ray Jones and the *Pingshe* group’s activities from an Asian-American perspective. See Jane Mee Wong, “Pingshe: Retrieving and Asian American Anarchist Tradition,” *Amerasia Journal* 34, no. 1 (2008): 133151.
[169] A fuller account of the range of Chinese transnational political activities and connections in the US can be found in the writings of Him Mark Lai. See Him Mark Lai, *Chinese American Transnational Politics* (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010). Also see, Him Mark Lai, “The Kuomintang in Chinese American Communities before World War II”, in *Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America*, ed. Sucheng Chan (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991): 170–212. For an introduction to CCP activities in the United States, see Anna Belogurova, “Networks, Parties and the ‘Oppressed Nations’: The Comintern and Chinese Communists Overseas, 1926–1935”, *Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review* 6(2) (2017): 558–582; also see Josephine Fowler, *Japanese and Chinese Immigrant Activists: Organizing in America and International Communist Movements, 1919–1933* (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007). For examples from the Chinese experience in Cuba, see Joan Casanovas, *Bread or Bullets! Urban Labor and Spanish Colonialism in Cuba, 18501898* (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998); Lisa Yun, *The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Servants and African Slaves in Cuba* (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008); and Kathleen Lopez, *Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History* (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).
[170] Following a lead from Kenyon Zimmer, a brief mention of the Chinese Equality Group of Boston is contained in the October 1928 Conference of *The Road to Freedom* group, a New York-based anarchist journal and society. See IISH, Max Nettlau Papers, ARCH01001.1032. This could be a mistake in the records as there exists a report by the San Francisco Equality group from presumably the same conference. See a write-up of the report with commentary by Mitch Miller, “Chinese Anarchists in the U.S.”, libcom.org, [[https://libcom.org/forums/history/chinese-anarchistsin-the-u-s][libcom.org]]. Zimmer has also recently been working on Chinese anarchist organizing in the 1919 Chinatown Waiters Strike in New York. Other New York-based Chinese anarchists are mentioned in interviews with anarchist organizer, Sam Dolgoff. See Avrich, 424.
[171] See Him Mark Lai, *Chinese American Transnational Politics*, especially chapters “Anarchism, Communism, and China’s Nationalist Revolution”, and “Organizing the Community: Communists during the Great Depression”. For social aspect of Chinese transnational experience see Philip Kuhn, *Chinese Among Others: Emigration in Modern Times* (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008).
[172] Him Mark Lai, “Anarchism, Communism, and China’s Nationalist Revolution”, 60.
[173] Ba Jin to Ray Jones, May/June 1919, Ray Jones Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, Asian American Studies Archive, Ethnic Studies Library, University of California, Berkeley, AAS ARC 2000/46, box 1, folder 5.
[174] Ba Jin to Ray Jones, June 26, 1929, Ray Jones Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/46, box 1, folder 5.
[175] In a letter to Jones dated March 25, 1929 and another dated March/April, 1929, Ba Jin mentions delays in printing that are affecting the distribution of issues of *Pingdeng* and assorted pamphlets. Later, in the June 26 letter, after Ba Jin outlines the difficulties of finding decent prices on type, he discusses the GMD raids that discovered their distribution site. This would not have been the first encounter with police forces. In 1928, military police raided Freedom Bookstore, a main distribution point of *Pingdeng* and other anarchist literature after reports in the press alleged the bookstore had communist contacts. See “Shanghai ziyou shudian bei feng” 《上海自由书店被封》 [Shanghai’s Ziyou Bookstore is Shuttered], in *Pingdeng*, no. 11, 1928, 16 for further details.
[176] Ba Jin to Ray Jones, n.d. 1929, Ray Jones Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/46, box 1, folder 5.
[177] Ba Jin to Ray Jones, n.d. 1929, Ray Jones Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/46, box 1, folder 5.
[178] News of Jones’s arrest was covered in the May 1928 edition of *Pingdeng*. See Zhongfu, “Bei pu jingguo qingxin”, *Pingdeng*, no. 11 1928, 11. Also see Chapter 3 for further details.
[179] Ba Jin to Ray Jones, June 26, 1929, Ray Jones Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/46,box 1, folder 5.
[180] Ba Jin to Ray Jones, May 7, 1930, Ray Jones Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/46, box 1, folder 5.
[181] The number of names Ba Jin used throughout *Pingdeng*’s run demonstrates how central he was to putting together the journal. This was backed up by Jones’s own memory that Ba Jin was perhaps the publication’s most important author. See Jones’s recollections in Avrich, *Anarchist Voices*, 409. However, Ba Jin’s overrepresentation in *Pingdeng* did not mean it was his affair alone. Jones and others all contributed significantly.
[182] Ba Jin mentions difficulties in keeping both around. See letters on March 25, 1929, June 26, 1929, and n.d. 1929 for Huilin, and March/April 1929 for Wu Kegang. Both Wei Huilin and Wu Kegang were busy with other undertakings. At the time Wu Kegang would have had teaching appointments at the National Labor University in Shanghai and would have been preparing to take up the headmaster’s position at Liming Advanced Middle School in Quanzhou. According to the March/April letter, we know he was in Shanghai. Wei Huilin presents an interesting case. Ba Jin, in the March 25 letter mentions he wrote to Wei Huilin requesting his return to Shanghai. In the June 26 letter, Ba Jin remarks that Huilin is leaving Shanghai. In the undated letter, Ba Jin notes that Huilin will only be in Shanghai for a short spell. Given that in 1929, Huilin began studying for an advanced degree in anthropology at the College de France in Paris, it must be assumed that his trip to Shanghai was a one off. Hence, the undated letter to Jones was written sometime between April and June since Ba Jin does not mention Huilin in the March/April letter in which he discusses Wu Kegang’s help.
[183] See Ba Jin to Ray Jones, June 26, 1929, Ray Jones Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/46, box 1, folder 5.
[184] Ba Jin to Ray Jones, March/April 1929, Ray Jones Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/46, box 1, folder 5.
[185] Circulation numbers for the plethora of anarchist journals during the period are hard to come by. In their exchanges. Kenyon Zimmer’s notes on circulation figures for US-based anarchist journals presents a possible comparison for Ba Jin, Jones, and their comrades as it seems most longer lasting anarchist periodicals in the US had an average circulation of several thousand. But, a more important comparison lies in comparing the circulation figures with other Chinese anarchist journals, especially at the height of the movement in the early 20s, if these numbers can be estimated. See Kenyon Zimmer, “Anarchist Newspapers and Periodicals 1872–1940”, University of Washington, *Mapping American Social Movements*, [[https://depts.washington.edu/moves/anarchist_mapnewspapers.shtml][depts.washington.edu]], accessed 10 August 2020. Interestingly, fellow Bay Area Italian anarchists who published the paper, *L’Emancipazione* reported that the Pingshe published around two thousand copies of *Pingdeng*. However, we currently do not have any hard numbers on that. See “Cronaca Locale,” *L’Emancipazione*, no. 5, 11 November 1927, p. 4. Thanks to Kenyon Zimmer for sharing his scans of *L’Emancipazione*.
[186] Two prominent examples would be *Gongyu*, published in France, and *Minzhong* in Guangzhou and later Shanghai. Both journals were available in China, Europe and North America. Notices in *Xuehui* would advertise contact and distribution addresses for *Gongyu*. In *Minzhong’s* case, its donations list would regularly list donations that came in from overseas from the Philippines and the United States, with Jones and the Pingshe among the contributors.
[187] Emma Goldman to Ba Jin, May 26, 1927, reel 18/271, Emma Goldman Papers Project.
[188] Zimmer, Immigrants Against the State, 182–184.
[189] Ibid., 182–183. A number of Italian anarchists who participated in the Emancipazione Group would later recall just how deeply involved Jones became. See Avrich, *Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America*, 163–169.
[190] Ba Jin to Ray Jones, September 4, 1948, Ray Jones Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/46, box 1, folder 5. The Adunata group that Ba Jin mentions is most likely *L’Adunata dei refrattari*, an anarchist periodical published by a collective of Italian anarchists in New York from 1922 to 1971. The journal was connected to the Emancipazione group, and some members of the Adunata group made their way to San Francisco from New York in the 1920s and 30s. See Avrich, 163–169.
[191] See Agnes Inglis to Ray Jones, December 22, 1934 and Ray Jones to Agnes Inglis, February 3, 1936, Agnes Inglis Papers, Joseph Labadie Collection, Hatcher Graduate Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, box 11.
[192] Ray Jones to Agnes Inglis, May 23, 1949, Agnes Inglis Papers, box 11.
[193] Turcato, “Italian Anarchism as Transnational Movement,” 411–417. In this section on methodology, Turcato lays out his arguments as to why examining the circulation of printed materials gives a much more realistic account of anarchist movements than studies focused on the existence of organizations. In the case of the Chinese anarchist press, for which we do not yet have enough numbers to make reasonable estimates, we can trace these numbers through the available correspondence and orders to the printers. As shown through Ray Jones’s correspondence with Ba Jin, the circulation and number of copies printed was a constant. Other avenues include extrapolating information from sources like group ledger sheets, advertisements in the journals, notices of confiscated materials, and so forth. This is why communications boards like *Xuehui*’s *xiaotongxin* section can be a lifeline, as anarchists would often post requests for materials or ads for ‘X’ number of available issues of a particular journal, Jones kept a list of books, pamphlets, and other publications he had on hand, things he had received, and things he was to send out. In China, notices on the confiscation and/or seizure of anarchist materials would occasionally appear. Altogether, these methods will not provide hard numbers, but they can provide a sense of where and who Chinese anarchist journals reached.
[194] Ba Jin, Wu Kegang, and Wei Huilin’s essays were written in France, sent back to China and published by the *Minzhong* group as a standalone booklet. Together, this collection was titled, “Wuzhengfuzhuyi yu shijian wenti.” 《无政府主义与实践问题》 [Anarchism and the Question of Practice]. The main question dealt with by the three authors was to what extent should anarchists in China participate in the revolution happening in the 1920s. This meant the GMD’s revolution under the United Front with the CCP. In the aftermath of the April 12, 1927 purges, this question focused squarely on the nature of the GMD’s revolution. What Ba Jin, Wei, and Wu asked, essentially, was “Who and what groups were carrying out revolution? Was it just the GMD? To what extent were the GMD’s actions revolutionary? If the GMD’s revolution was imperfect, should anarchists participate to ensure the revolution carried through past the GMD’s limited objectives? How should they participate in the GMD’s revolution?” See Huilin, Feigan, Junyi, “Wuzhengfuzhuyi yu shijian wenti,” WSZX, 830–848.
[195] Dirlik, *Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution*, 250–261 provides a thorough discussion of the divisions between pro-GMD and anti-GMD anarchists.
[196] Gu Yeping, “Quanzhou minzhong yundongzhong de Liming gaozhong yu Pingmin zhongxue” 《泉州民众运动中的黎明高中与平民中学》 [Liming Advanced Middle School and Pingmin Middle School in the Quanzhou Masses Movement], *Quanzhou shifan daxue xuekan* 24, no. 5 (2006): 33.
[197] Gu Yeping, “Lun Ba Jin de geming xushi yu Quanzhou 30 niandaide minzhong yundong” 《论巴金的革命叙事与泉州 30 年代的民众运动》 [On Ba Jin’s Revolutionary Narratives and Quanzhou’s Masses Movement of the 1930s], *Xiandai Zhongguo wenxue yanjiu congkan*, no. 2 (2006): 109.
[198] Chen Jiangping, “Ba Jin de Quanzhou yuan ji qi wenhua yiyi” 《巴金的泉州缘及其文化意义》 [Ba Jin’s Bond with Quanzhou and its Cultural Meaning], *Wulunmuqi daxue xuekan* 18, no. 1 (2009): 70. 9
[199] Gu, “Lun Ba Jin de geming xushi,” 112–114.
[200] Jia Yumin, “Meili de jingshen jiayuan—guanyu Ba Jin yu an’naqi zhuyi de zai sikao” 《美丽的精神家园——关于巴金与安那其主义的再思考 》 [A Spiritual Home of Beauty: Reconsiderations of Ba Jin and Anarchism], *Huanghe keji daxue xuekan* 7, no. 1 (2005): 74; Yang Lili, “Wuzhengfu zhuyi de xinyangzhe dao jiechu de minzhu zhuyi zhanshi—cong Ba Jin de chuangzuo huodong kan qi sixiang zhuanbian guocheng” 《无政府主义的信仰者到杰出的民主主义战士——从巴金的创作活动看其思想转变过程》 [Anarchist Believer to Outstanding Soldier of Democracy: Examining the Process of Ba Jin’s Thought Transformation from the Life of his Works], *Luoyang daxue xuekan* 5, no. 3 (2000): 50.
[201] Jia, 74 and 76.
[202] Ba Jin, “Letter from Ba Jin to the CRIA [International Anarchist Liaison Commission, Paris], 18 March 1949,” Kate Sharpley Library, [[http://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/15dvhn][www.katesharpleylibrary.net]]. This letter was originally written in French.
[203] “Jinian Ba Jin xiansheng danchen 109 zhounian ji Quanzhoushi di er ju Ba Jin wen hua jie ju ban” 《纪念巴金先生诞辰 109 周年及泉州市第二届巴金文化节举办》 [Proceedings of Quanzhou’s Second Annual Ba Jin Culture Festival in Memorial of Ba Jin’s 109th Year], accessed 8 December 2020, [[http://www.huitongcorp.com/?p=321][www.huitongcorp.com]].
[204] “Jinian Ba Jin xiansheng danchen 109 zhounian ji Quanzhoushi di er ju Ba Jin wen hua jie ju ban.”
[205] “Jinian Ba Jin xiansheng danchen 109 zhounian ji Quanzhou shi di er jie Ba Jin wenhua jie kaimu shi zai wo xiao longzhong juxing” 《纪念巴金先生诞辰 109 周年及泉州市第二届巴金文化节开幕实在我校隆重举行》 [The Glorious Opening Ceremony at My School of The Second Quanzhou Ba Jin Culture Festival in Memorial of Ba Jin’s 109th Anniversary], Liming zhiye daxue dangwu gongzuo bu, accessed 11 August 2020, [[http://www.lmu.edu.cn/html/968/2013-12-16/content-12303.html][www.lmu.edu.cn]].
[206] Yamaguchi Mamoru, “Ba Jin yu Aima Gaodeman: 20 shiji 20 niandai guomin geming zhong de wuzhengfuzhuyi.”
[207] Ba Jin, “Gei E.G.,” 《给 E.G.》 [For E.G.] *Ba Jin quanji* 《巴金全集》[The Complete Works of Ba Jin], vol. 12 (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1987).
[208] Ba Jin, “Gei E.G.” This quote ends the letter. It is a richly dense and personal statement that basically alludes to imagery from Turgenev’s poem, “On the Threshold” and Ba Jin and Goldman meeting on the shores of the Mediterranean in Barcelona, in the presence of heroic female revolutionary figures. Goldman had given a lecture, “Heroic Women of the Russian Revolution”, in England in 1925, which alluded to Turgenev’s poem. This lecture also seems to have been published as an essay. Ba Jin had translated the poem in 1929 and again in 1935 and quite actively looked to translate and write on female revolutionaries. However, it is not known whether Ba Jin knew of Goldman’s essay. Various drafts of Goldman’s lecture/essay have been compiled by the Emma Goldman Papers Project, reel 50/47-69. See a transcription of one of these drafts on Emma Goldman, “Heroic Women of the Russian Revolution,” *Kate Sharpley Library*, [[https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/3xsk7w][www.katesharpleylibrary.net]]. Accessed 11 August 2020. The published essay appeared in the Calcutta-based publication, *Welfare*. See Ole Birk Laursen, “‘I Believe My Name is Not Unknown in India’: Emma Goldman and the Indian Revolutionary Movement, 1909–1925”, personal blog, 17 July 2020, [[https://olebirklaursen.wordpress.com/2017/10/03/i-believe-my-name-is-not-unknown-in-india-emmagoldman-and-the-indian-revolutionary-movement-1909-1925/][olebirklaursen.wordpress.com]]. Laursen has also posted a scan of the issue of *Welfare* in which Goldman’s essay appears: [[https://olebirklaursen.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/emma-goldmanheroic-women-of-the-russian-revolution-1925.pdf][olebirklaursen.files.wordpress.com]]. For an English translation of Turgenev’s poem, see Ivan Turgenev, “Threshold,” trans. C.T Evans, [[https://novaonline.nvcc.edu/eli/evans/HIS241/Notes/Turgenev_Threshold.html][novaonline.nvcc.edu]], last modified 7 May 2005.
[209] Yamaguchi Mamoru describes Ba Jin as being conflicted between continuing his career as a writer who believed in anarchism and an anarchist activist. Yamaguchi frames this in terms of Ba Jin’s travels to Yokohama in 1934 as a means to resolve his doubts. In Yamaguchi’s analysis, Ba Jin’s trip to Japan only furthered his dilemma as he believed the Japanese radical intellectuals he observed were all to ready to serve the cause of Japanese militarism. See Yamaguchi Mamoru, “Ba Jin zai Hengbin,” 《巴金在横滨》 [Ba Jin in Yokohama], in *Ba Jin de shijie* (Beijing: Dongfang chubanshe, 1995), 96.
[210] A consummate study of the impact of left-wing politics on sympathetic authors is Tsi-an Hsia, *The Gate of Darkness: Studies on the Leftist Literary Movement in China* (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968).
[211] Xu’s attack on Ba Jin and French, Spanish, and Chinese anarchists originally appeared in a private letter written to Lu Xun 鲁迅 (1881–1936) at the beginning of August. Xu’s intention was to attack Lu Xun over his stance in ideological squabbles between the League of Left-Wing Writers and non-aligned leftist writers over what kind of literature should be written to advance Chinese society and resist the Japanese. The argument centered on two competing slogans and manifestos, the League’s “National Defense Literature” versus the Chinese Literary Workers’ (a group on paper sponsored by Lu Xun) “Mass Literature for the National Revolutionary War”. Ba Jin’s place in this was that he wrote the manifesto for “Mass Literature for the National Revolutionary War”. Lu Xun did not take kindly to these attacks and published Xu’s letter and a rebuttal in the August 15, 1936 edition of the journal *Zuojia*. In his rebuttal, Lu Xun, in addition to defending Ba Jin and his anarchism, loudly called on Ba Jin and others slandered by Xu to speak out. Ba Jin obliged in the next issue on September 15. See Lu Xun, “Da Xu Maoyong bing guanyu kang ri tongyi zhanxian wenti”, *Zuojia*, vol. 1, no. 5 (1936): 1138–1150, and Ba Jin, “Da Xu Maoyong bing tan Xibanya de lianhe zhanxian”, *Zuojia*, vol. 1, no. 6 (1936): 1362–1368. For a quick and easy outline of the context surrounding Lu Xun and Xu Maoyong’s initial exchange, see David Pollard, *The True Story of Lu Xun* (Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong Press, 2002), 188–194. Also see Olga Lang’s account of this incident, which focuses more on Ba Jin’s experience.
[212] Ba Jin, “Da Xu Maoyong”, pp. 1364. It is interesting that in his retort to Xu, Ba Jin states that he himself, though standing with the anarchists and believing in the anarchist cause, can no longer be counted among their ranks. Clearly, he is referencing his shedding of anarchist activist undertakings when he became an author. The rest of Ba Jin’s retort is devoted to painstakingly detailing the specific activities of Spanish anarchist organizations in the lead up to the civil war in 1936. Essentially, he is one, demonstrating Xu’s complete lack of knowledge about Spain, and two, his still ongoing and deep connection to anarchist movements across the world.
[213] Translations include: *The Struggle for Spain* 《西班牙的斗争》by Rudolf Rocker, *Death of a Spanish Fighter* 《一个西班牙战士的死》by Helmut Rudiger, *Fighter Durruti* 《战士杜鲁蒂》by Emma Goldman, *Spain* 《西班牙》by August Souchy. See Yamaguchi Mamoru, “Ba Jin yu xibanya neizhan” 《巴金与西班牙内战》 [Ba Jin and the Spanish Civil War], in *Hei’an zhi guang* for more examples. Also see Angel Pino’s master list of all Ba Jin translations ever.
[214] The speech translated by Ba Jin would have been *Fighter Durruti*. See Pino, “Ba Jin as Translator” as well. A copy of *Fighter Durruti* was later donated to the University of Michigan by Ray Jones in 1949.
[215] Buenaventura Durruti, *Spartacus Educational*, [[https://spartacus-educational.com/SPdurruti.htm][spartacus-educational.com]], accessed November 1, 2019. There exists a wider literature on Durruti both in terms of his place within Spanish anarchist movements and the initial phase of the Civil War and his status as an anarchist icon.
[216] Ba Jin’s fascination with and understanding of violence can be seen in his essay, “Wuzhengfuzhuyi yu kongbuzhuyi” 《无政府主义与恐怖主义》 [Anarchism and Terrorism], WSZX, 742–750. In this essay, Ba Jin comes out against terrorism as a means to achieve anarchist liberation. Anarchist liberation may only come about through education and organization of the masses so that they may liberate themselves. However, terrorism and violence will have a role to play in the revolution as anarchists and the oppressed need to defend themselves from the state. Further, he argues terrorists and those who resort to violence are actually those most filled with love toward the world but have no means to realize that love. Violence and terrorism are the result of this contradiction.
[217] See Yamaguchi, “Ba Jin yu Aima Gaodeman” (n. 1) and Ba Jin, “Da Xu Maoyong” (n. 7) for further context.
[218] Some examples from the 1930s include “Hair”, “Dream of the South”, both of which were about colleagues at Liming School in Quanzhou. See chapter 4 for further discussions of Ba Jin’s writings on Fujian and how they have come to represent the school’s historical value.
[219] Ba Jin, “Foreword to New Edition,” WPKZZ, 100–101. Ba Jin here related the story inspiring story of a young girl who was moved by Kropotkin’s autobiography. Ba Jin wrote:
>In between this, I had already received some encouragement. I was especially moved by a story an older friend told me about an “unexpected encounter” of a friend during his youth in the air force. That youth was on a train (or he was in Hankou) when he bumped into a woman. He received a singular give from her—it was an illustrated edition of Kropotkin’s *Autobiography*. She introduced that good book to this newly met friend. I do not know who that woman was, but I appreciate that someone other than me has obtained benefit from this book.
[220] Jiang Jun, “Lu Jianbo xiansheng zaonian de wuzhengfuzhuyi xuanchuan huodong jishi” 《卢剑波先生早点的无政府主义宣传活动纪实》 [An Account of Mr. Lu Jianbo’s Early Anarchist Propaganda Activities], WSZX, 1019–1020.
[221] Li Min, “Wuzhengfuzhuyi yu zhongguo kangzhan” 《无政府主义于中国抗战》[Anarchism and China’s War of Resistance], *WSXZ*, 890.
[222] Li Min, *WSXZ*, 891.
[223] Li Min, *WSXZ*, 896.
[224] Wu Yun, “Kangzhan zhu fangmian” 《抗战诸方面》 [Aspects of the Resistance War], in *WSXZ*, 883. This article originally appeared in *Jingzhe*, vol. 2, no. 4, January 1938.
[225] Li Min, *WSXZ*, 891.
[226] Li Min, *WSXZ*, 891.
[227] Errico Malatesta, “Anarchists Have Forgotten Their Principles,” *The Anarchist Library*, accessed 10 August 2016, [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/errico-malatesta-anarchists-the-war-and-their-principles][theanarchistlibrary.org]]
[228] Yinlizhi, “Yi zhanzheng qu fandui zhanzheng” 《以战争去反对战争》 [Opposing War Through War], in *WXSZ*, 878. This article originally appeared in *Jingzhe*, vol. 2, no. 1 (November 1937).
[229] Lu Jianbo, for example, wrote to Emma Goldman in France and collaborated with Ray Jones, an immigrant Chinese anarchist living in San Francisco. After the GMD White Terror in 1927, Jacques Reclus, a French anarchist who taught at Labor University helped Lu to safety after it became apparent GMD forces were targeting him. In late 1926, anarchists in China even floated the idea of forming an East Asian Anarchist League. The proposed organization would join together anarchists from China, Korea, Japan and other Asian countries with the aim of fighting colonialism and nationalism. See Liu Xu, “Zhuzhang zuzhi dongya wuzhengfuzhuyizhe dalianmeng” 《主张组织东亚无政府主义者大联盟》 [On Organizing an East Asian Anarchist League], WSZX, 716–719.
[230] Li Min, *WSXZ*, 889.
[231] Wu Yun, “Kang faxisizhuyi zhi dong xi zhan” 《抗法西斯主义之东西战》 [Anti-Fascist Wars of Resistance, East and West], *Jingzhe* vol. 2, no. 5, 1938, 8.
[232] Tian Shen, “Guoji kang faxisi huzhu hui” 《国际抗法西斯互助会》 [International Antifascist Solidarity], *Jingzhe* vol. 2, no. 5, 1938, 20–23. Tian Shen seems to be an abbreviation of Lu Jianbo’s pen name, Tian Shenyu.
[233] “International News-China”, *Freedom*, vol. 7, no. 9, 23 February 1946, p. 2. Lu Jianbo’s letter to *Tierra y Libertad* was dated January 28. Interestingly, *Freedom*’s announcement took place before Lu Jianbo’s letter was published. *Tierra y Libertad* published it on March 10, 1946. See Lu Chien-bo, “El Anarquismo en China”, *Tierra y Libertad*, año 3, numero 46, 10 March 1946, 3
[234] Lu’s report appears in *Cultural Proletaria* in June 1946, in *Il Risveglio* in June 1946, and in *Le Libertaire* in March 1946. Lu was invited to contribute an article for the inaugural issue of *Universo*. Most of these reports seem to have contained the same information regarding the situation in China. However, where differences may have occurred can only be assumed at this point without access to Lu’s originals.
[235] In his 12 June 1948 report to Freedom, Lu lists Ba Jin’s then current project to translate Kropotkin into Chinese. See Lu Chien-bo, “Report from China,” *Freedom*, vol. 9, no. 12, 12 June 1948, 8.
[236] In many of these initial contacts, Lu closed each letter with his mailing address, ‘Mr. Lu Chien-bo, P.O. Box 55, Chengtu, Sze. (China)’, with the hope of resuming exchange.
[237] Ibid.
[238] See “Declaration of Japanese Anarchists,” *Freedom*, vol. 9, no. 19, 18 September 1948, 1.
[239] How the summary traveled to Paris via Shanghai and London is described in the intro. See La Fédération Anarchiste du Japon “Vive la Fédération Anarchiste Japonaise!”, *Le Libertaire*, no. 150, 8 October 1948.
[240] See La Fédération Anarchiste du Japon, “Déclaration du 5e Congrès de la Fédération Anarchiste Japonaise”, *Le Libertaire*, no. 246, 8 December 1950.
[241] Ba Jin to CRIA, March 8, 1946, in *Yijian xinbian*, 46–47.
[242] In late 1948, Boris Yelensky (1889–1974), of the Free Society Group in Chicago asked Ba Jin to participate in submitting an essay for an anthology on the state of global anarchist movements. It was meant as a way to reconnect anarchists from across the globe and take a hard look at what future anarchist movements may have. After initially declining, Ba Jin gave in to Yelensky’s request, but it appears no essay came of it. In his response to Yelensky, Ba Jin lamented the lack of understanding of anarchism, and pointed out the absurd existence of “anarchist-bankers, anarchist-capitalists, anarchist-government officials, anarchist-nationalists.” In the end though, Yelensky and the Free Society Group published the anthology, *The World Scene from the Libertarian Point of View* in 1951. It did include contributions from Yamaga Taiji in Japan and MPT Acharya in India. See Boris Yelensky to Ba Jin, February 19, 1949, IISH, Boris Yelensky Papers, ARCH01674.87. A copy of the anthology is stored at the Joseph Labadie Collection, and a scan is also available at *Libcom.org*: [[https://libcom.org/library/world-scenelibertarian-point-view][libcom.org]].
[243] Li Pei Kan, “Per l’Enciclopedia Anarchica”, *L’Adunata Dei Refrattari*, vol. 27, no. 22, 12 June 1948, 6–7. Ba Jin contributed twenty-five dollars to the fund to translate and publish the Italian translation of Sébastien Faure’s *Anarchist Encyclopedia*. The encyclopedia was the brainchild of Sébastien Faure (1858–1944), French anarchist, publisher, journalist, and eclectic. Faure envisioned the encyclopedia to be a comprehensive guide to the entirety of anarchist thought and history. It was to include a dictionary, biographies, histories, and bibliographies. In the end, only the dictionary was completed, in four volumes, in 1934.
[244] L.C.B. “Lettere Dalla Cina”, *L’Adunata Dei Refrattari*, vol. 26, no. 17, 26 April 1947, 3–4.
[245] Angel Pino, “Correspondants de l’étranger: derniès traces: (1948–1950),” *A Contretemps: Bulletin de critique bibliographique*, no. 45 (March 2013), accessed June 10, 2016, [[http://acontretemps.org/spip.php?article454][acontretemps.org]] has a terrific overview of some of the anarchists in Italy with whom Ba Jin corresponded. Ba Jin corresponded in English with Inglis, Rocker, Ishill, and Yelensky. To Cuban anarchists, he wrote in French.
[246] “Work of an American Anarchist: The Labadie Labor Collection,” *Freedom,* vol. 8, no. 26, 27 December 1947, p. 3
[247] Ba Jin to Agnes Inglis, July 3, 1948; and Ba Jin to Agnes Inglis, October 19, 1948, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 13.
[248] Agnes Inglis to Ba Jin, November 21, 1948, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 13. Probuzhdenie was published out of Detroit from 1930 to 1939. In 1940, it merged with *Dielo Truda*, another Russian anarchist journal originally published in Paris. As *Dielo Truda-Probuzhdenie*, it continued another two decades.
[249] Martin Gudell to Agnes Inglis, December 22, 1948, Agnes Inglis Papers, box 9. The Mr. Maximov mentioned is Grigori Maximoff (1893–1950), a Russian anarchist associated with Nestor Makhno both in Ukraine and later in Paris. He was the editor of *Dielo Truda-Probuzhdenie* during the 1940s. In 1940, he famously published *The Guillotine at Work*, a scathing critique of the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917.
[250] Agnes Inglis to John Cherney, June 29, 1948, Agnes Inglis Papers, box 4.
[251] In a letter to Ray Jones, Ba Jin informs Jones that he sent numerous copies of *The Aurora of Spain* to Adunata group in the United States. It is more than possible that he sent copies to other immigrant anarchist groups as well. See Ba Jin to Ray Jones, September 4, 1948, Ray Jones Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/46, box 1, folder 5.
[252] Ba Jin to Agnes Inglis, September 18, 1950, box 13.
[253] Ba Jin to Agnes Inglis, November 8, 1948, Agnes Inglis Papers, box 13.
[254] Ba Jin, *Ziyou xue* 《自由血》[Blood of Freedom], in *Ba Jin Quanji* 《巴金全集》 [Complete Works of Ba Jin], vol. 21 (Beijing: Renmin daxue chubanshe, 1993), 94. Van Zandt was forced to marry Spies by proxy rather than in person due to public outrage over the idea that the daughter of a respectable family could ever marry a radical immigrant anarchist.
[255] Agnes Inglis to Johanna Boetz-Clevans, January 25, 1949, Agnes Inglis Papers, box 4.
[256] Ba Jin to Agnes Inglis, September 18, 1950, Agnes Inglis Papers, box 13.
[257] See Agnes Inglis to Ba Jin, December 19, 1948; Agnes Inglis to Ba Jin, February 3, 1949; Agnes Inglis to Ba Jin, March 6, 1949; Agnes Inglis to Ba Jin, March 14, 1949; and Agnes Inglis to Ba Jin, April 4, 1949, Agnes Inglis Papers, box 13. In her March 14, 1949 letter to Ba Jin, Inglis indicates she would later send a package of additional materials on Spies and Van Zandt she was currently having copied. It seems she sent this material in the April 4th letter.
[258] Ba Jin to Agnes Inglis, May 7, 1949, Agnes Inglis Papers, box 13.
[259] Agnes Inglis to Johanna Boetz-Clevans, January 25, 1949, Agnes Inglis Papers, box 4.
[260] Agnes Inglis to Ba Jin, November 27, 1949, Agnes Inglis Papers, box 13.
[261] Ba Jin, *Wo de younian*, in WSZX, 1004–1005. Ray Jones also held a similar view on the power of reading. See his poem, “The Library of Ray Jones,” Ray Jones Papers, and an analysis of it in Wong, 143. See also discussion in the following chapter.
[262] Traces of Inglis’s pride at her work in the collection appear often in her letter writing. In her correspondence with Emma Goldman, this comes through on many occasions. See Emma Goldman to Agnes Inglis, June 8, 1928, Agnes Inglis Papers, for example.
[263] This total has been calculated through the receipts that Ba Jin and Ray Jones made of their donations and crosschecked with Agnes Inglis’s acknowledgements of receipt she sent back. See Appendix.
[264] Agnes Inglis to Ba Jin, May 24, 1950, Agnes Inglis Papers, box 13.
[265] Agnes Inglis to Ba Jin, May 24, 1950, Agnes Inglis Papers, box 13.
[266] Agnes Inglis to John Cherny, June 29, 1950, Agnes Inglis Papers, box 4.
[267] Ba Jin to Ray Jones, December 29, 1949, Ray Jones Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/46, box 1, folder 5.
[268] Officially, *Pingdeng* ran from 1927 to 1931. However, the Pingshe was active in some manner well into the 1930s, particularly through the efforts of Ray Jones, as this chapter intends to show.
[269] Him Mark Lai provided the initial scholarly English-language account of Jones’s arrest. See Him Mark Lai, *Chinese American Transnational Politics* (Urbana and Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 60. In this account, Lai notes that Jones was arrested while handing out pamphlets relating to the recently executed Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Kenyon Zimmer later narrated this event from the vantage point of Bay Area Italian anarchist communities who reported on the incident. In Zimmer’s account, Jones was instead arrested while handing out pamphlets relating to the deportation case of Italian anarchist Armando Borghi (18821969), a veteran militant and noted speaker and labor organizer. See Kenyon Zimmer, *Immigrants Against the State:* *Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America* (Urbana and Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 183.
[270] Here it is interesting to note that in Zimmer’s account, Jones and Chen Shuyao 陈述尧 were arrested together. In Him Mark Lai’s account, Jones is arrested alone. It is not yet certain who the penname Zhongfu belongs to, especially as Chen Shuyao usually appeared in *Pingdeng* as Shuyao. Yong Chen, *Chinese San Francisco, 18501943: A Trans-Pacific Community* (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press), also mentions the arrest of two Chinese anarchists in 1928 in his brief discussion of radical anarchists in Chinatown. However, Chen does not provide names. The March 1928 edition of *L’Emancipazione* lists “Ching-Foo e Choy Him” of the Pingshe as the Chinese arrested. More than likely, Choy Him was the romanization Jones used for his Chinese name, Cai Xian. See “Cronaca del Movimento Locale, *L’Emancipazione*, no. 5, March 1928, p. 4.
[271] Zhongfu, “Bei bu jingguo qingxing” 《被捕经过情形》 [Being Arrested], *Pingdeng*, no. 10, May 1928, *Quanguo baokan suoyin*, www.cnbksy.com, accessed 19 September 2019. Unless otherwise noted, most issues of *Pingdeng* consulted for this chapter were accessed through the *Quanguo baokan suoyin*. Ray Jones, in an interview with Paul Avrich stated that there existed very few traces of Pingdeng’s activities, though he did donate a set of *Pingdeng* to the San Francisco Public Library, though nothing in Him Mark Lai’s notes indicate this collection still existing. The digital scans in the CNBKSY site are missing nos. 1 and 3–7. For Jones’s interview with Avrich, see Paul Avrich, *Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America* (Edinburgh and Oakland: AK Press, 2005), 410.
[272] “Xiao xiaoxi” 《小消息》 [News], *Pingdeng*, no. 10, May 1928. In this announcement at the end of the issue, the editors estimate they lost somewhere between 3000–4000 copies of printed materials. This included issues of *Pingshe* as well as pamphlets and booklets they distributed for free and books they sold for profit. The impact of the arrest and confiscation of their library was later mentioned in the July issue of *Pingdeng* as a rallying cry for the group and publication to continue on. See “Xiaoxi,” *Pingdeng*, no. 12 (July 1928).
[273] “Ray Jones Interview”, Him Mark Lai Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/80, Box 121, Folder 22. Though Jones does not remember much in the way of police harassment, this is not to say he and his group did not suffer any. There was certainly pressure from local GMD organizations, the CCBA, the Chinese branches of the CPUSA as well as overseas branches of the CCP. The relationships between Jones, Pingshe, and these others will be discussed at length throughout the chapter.
[274] Zhongfu, “Bei bu jingguo qingxing”, *Pingdeng*, no. 10 (May 1928).
[275] “Yuanjiu Bo’erji!” 《援救波尔基!》 [Save Borghi!], *Pingdeng*, no. 10, May 1928. No author is given for the article, and it does not specifically mention concrete actions to be taken by the Pingshe group. However, it is a call to arms in support of Borghi. It traces his career as a militant anarchist and outlines his activities in the United States and the chicaneries of the Italian consulate in Boston and the duplicity of American officials. Additionally, it includes a rough transcript of his interrogation. Given the nature of these transcripts, it is logical to conclude that much of the text would have been obtained from Italian comrades in the Bay Area. Another possibility is that they found the transcripts published in translation in an English language periodical.
[276] Zimmer, 183–184.
[277] Ibid.
[278] Ibid.
[279] See interviews by Esther Travaglio, Vincenzo Ferrero, Dominick Sallitto, and Mark Luca in Paul Avrich, *Anarchist Voices*.
[280] Avrich, *Anarchist Voices*, “Dominick Sallitto”, 167.
[281] Ibid., “Mark Luca”, 168. Jones even kept a New Year’s card sent from the family in his personal papers. Being anarchists, the card had a somewhat more radical message of New Year’s hope: “Above all this madness, may the New Year bring you and everyone real peace, freedom and equality….And may it inspire us all toward steadfastness in thought and action.” “Miscellaneous Documents”, Ray Jones Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/46, Box 1, Folder 20.
[282] Zimmer, 183–184;186–192. It is important to note that the IG and the lead editor of its organ, *Man!*, Marcus Graham (1893–1985), soon became involved with his own deportation proceedings. As the proceedings against Graham progressed, it is apparent that activities of the IG fell by the wayside. Looking at the activities and announcements contained in the journal, it appears from 1935 on, there were fewer and fewer activities and social gatherings organized by the IG.
[283] Two recent examples of cross-ethnic radicalism in California are Allison Varzally, *Making a Non-White America:* and David M. Struthers, *The World in a City*. PLM anarchist efforts to take Tijuana in the early years of the Mexican Revolution as well as the support the group received from figures like John Reed (1887–1920), Ethel Duffy Turner (1885–1969), and William C. Owen (1854–1929) are other examples. See Lomnitz, *The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón* and Ward, *Always a Rebel.*
[284] Jane Mee Wong, “Pingshe: Retrieving an Asian-American Anarchist Tradition,” *Ameriasia Journal* 34, no 1 (2008): 132–151. Wong’s reading of Pingshe is perhaps the only in-depth analysis so far of their ideology and activities. This chapter takes its lead from her reading but emphasizes more the networks and connections through which the Pingshe operated.
[285] Anthony W. Lee, *Picturing Chinatown: Art and Orientalism in San Francisco* (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Much of the focus on San Francisco’s radical Chinese art scene has been on painters like Yun Gee (1906–1963) and his associated groups, but there were a great number of Chinese artist and artisans who interweaved art and radical politics. One such artist, David Chun, who did artwork for the Bay Area anarchist publication, *Man!* will be briefly discussed in this chapter.
[286] Lai, 58. The Vancouver aspect of this is a feature that is understudied. Vancouver and British Columbia’s place in trans-Pacific radical networks are something taken up by Kornel Chang, *Pacific Connections: The Making of a U.S.-Canadian Borderlands* (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
[287] Shuyao, “History of Meizhou Gongyi Tongmeng Zonghui (Unionist Guild of America),” Him Mark Lai, trans., *Chinese America: History and Perspectives* 22 (2008): 25–27. Chen’s role as an organizer cannot be understated. Though this chapter is primarily about Ray Jones as the hub of Pingshe and *Pingdeng*’s existence, Chen shows up in the records as one of the main financial contributors. This will be discussed in later sections concerning listed donations received by *Pingdeng*.
[288] See Hilary Lazar, “*Man!* and the International Group: American Anarchism’s Missing Chapter”, which appears to be an informal paper posted on *Libcom.org*, provides a detailed overview of *Man!*.
[289] See *Man!*, vol. 1, nos. 8–9 (August-September 1933); vol. 2, no. 8 (August 1934); and vol. 3, no. 1 (January 1935). Joseph Labadie Collection, University of Michigan Library. All subsequent citations to *Man!* come from the Labadie Collection.
[290] Wong, 138–140.
[291] Chen, *Chinese San Francisco*, 191–192.
[292] Here, it is important to note the last lines from Jones’s interview with Avrich, “Anarchism is still the most beautiful idea, and I think someday it will come.” Avrich, ‘Red Jones”, 410.
[293] Liu Shipei, “Wuzhengfuzhuyi zhi pingdeng guan” 《无政府主义之平等观》 [The Anarchist View of Equality], in WZSX, 72–85. Also see Morgan Rocks, *Anarchism and Chinese Modernity: The Use of the Confucian Tradition in the Writings of Liu Shipei, 1884–1919*, MA Thesis, Chapter 5 for a detailed overview of Liu’s argument regarding San Francisco politics and his probable sources of information.
[294] Liu certainly was not the only self-professed anarchist/socialist to look to San Francisco. Jiang Kanghu spent considerable time there in the 1910s. See Dirlik’s Socialism and Anarchism Chapter in *Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution*.
[295] Yong Chen outlines the importance of events like the 1905 Chinese boycott against American goods and efforts to rebuild the Bay Area Chinese communities after the 1906 earthquake as not only instances in which the Qing court and revolutionaries sought to harness the growing nationalism of Chinese in the United States, but also moments when such communities were able to articulate their own complex transnational identities. In Chen’s estimation, Bay Area Chinese, though thankful of Qing assistance, were not inclined to support its continued rule See Chen, 155–157 and 166–172.Also see L. Eve Armentrout Ma, *Revolutionaries, Monarchists, and Chinatowns: Chinese Politics in the Americas and the 1911 Revolution* (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1990) argues that up until 1908, most Chinese in San Francisco supported the efforts of reformers.
[296] Scholars such as Prasenjit Duara and Rebecca Karl have argued that late Qing efforts to modernize and build a nation-state along European lines took place in a global context that pitted the opposing forces territorial sovereignty and transnational citizenry. Policies meant to strengthen state capacities territorially necessarily meant making claims on Chinese migrant communities financially and legally. Sun Yat-sen and the revolutionaries also looked to Chinese migrant communities for monetary support and was in the United States on a fundraising tour at the time of the 1911 Revolution. All this took place in the context of overseas communities finding their own voice. See Prasenjit Duara, “Transnationalism and the Predicament of Sovereignty: China, 1900–1945”, *American Historical Review* 102, no. 4 (1997): 1030–1051; “Transnationalism in the Era of Nation-States: China, 1900–1945”, *Development and Change* 29, no. 4 (1998): 647–670; and “Nationalism and Transnationalism in the Globalization of China”, *China Report* 39, no. 1 (2003): 1–19. Rebecca Karl argues that Chinese nationalism was codified through transnational experience, that re-imaginings of the Chinese nation-state and the Asian region came through a re-reading and re-ordering of global history. Of particular salience to this dissertation’s arguments, these reimaginings were not always predicated on the reconstitution of the Chinese nation-state. See Karl, *Staging the World*, 168–174 and Karl, “Creating Asia: China in the World at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century”, *American Historical Review* 103, no. 4 (1998): 1096–1118 for a discussion of Liu Shipei and the Asian Solidarity Society. In the case of the 1911 Revolution, much of the existing scholarship on Chinese migrant communities’ involvement focuses on the Nanyang Chinese. See the Yen Ching-haw, *The Overseas Chinese and the 1911 Revolution, with Special Reference to Singapore and Malaya* (Kuala Lumpur and New York: Oxford University Press, 1976) and Lee Lai To and Lee Hock Guan, eds., *Sun Yat-sen, Nanyang, and the 1911 Revolution* (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asia Studies, 2011) as representative examples. L. Eve Armentrout Ma’s work, though, is an exception. Though the importance of the Nanyang Chinese cannot be overstated, a broader view of the transnational dimensions of the 1911 Revolution and its aftereffects is needed. The next chapter, in part, seeks to open such a broader space of analysis by broaching the revolutionary links between Nanyang Chinese and anarchists in Fujian.
[297] Him Mark Lai put together an enormous compilation on the Chinese language press in North America, and several of his shorter pieces on the development of Chinese language news can be found on *Himmarklai.org* under the “Digitized Articles” section. The compilation is Him Mark Lai and Karl Lo, *Chinese Newspapers Published in North America, 1854–1975* (Washington, D.C.: Center for Chinese Research Materials, Association of Research Libraries, 1977) and
[298] Erika Lee, *At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era* (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 194–195 and Mae M. Ngai, *Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America* (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 204–206 provide two good overviews of the ‘Paper Sons’ practice and its implications.
[299] Maia Ramnath, *Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism an Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire* (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011) for a discussion of San Francisco’s place in the Ghadar Movement’s founding and transnational Indian revolutionary discourse.
[300] Zimmer, 119. San Francisco can even be counted as a proxy birthplace for Chinese anarchist practice as well since Kotuku Shushi played an active role in introducing Liu Shipei and other Tokyo-based Chinese students to anarchist discourse. See Dirlik, *Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution* and Zarrow, *Anarchism in Chinese Political Culture* for further details.
[301] Peter Cole, *Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive-Era Philadelphia* (Urbana and Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 2007) offers a look at IWW efforts at integration on the east coast, and for the west coast, see Daniel Rosenberg, “The IWW and Organization of Asian Workers in Early Twentieth-Century America,” *Labor History* 36, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 77–87; and Gillian Creese, “Exclusion or Solidarity? Vancouver Workers Confront the ‘Oriental Problem’”, *BC Studies*, no. 80 (Winter 1988–89): 24–51. Kenyon Zimmer has recently been looking into the formation of a Chinese IWW local in New York in 1919. See Zimmer, “The Chop Suey Strike of 1919: Chinese Workers, New York Radicalism, and the Origins of the First Red Scare,” Newberry Library Labor History Seminar, Chicago, 12 April, 2019.
[302] Kornel Chang, “Mobilizing Revolutionary Manhood: Race, Gender, and Resistance in the Pacific Northwest Borderlands,” in Moon-Ho Jung, ed., *The Rising Tide of Color: Race, State Violence, and Radical Movements across the Pacific* (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014), 72–101.
[303] Lee, 176.
[304] Lai, “Chinese American Transnational Politics,” 58.
[305] In his interview with Him Mark Lai, Jones’s Chinese names are listed as Liu Zhongshi 刘中时, Zhong Shi 中时, Zhong Shi 钟时, or Cai Xian 蔡贤. In his personal writings, Jones would occasionally write his name as Zhong Xi 忠庶 or Zhong Shi 忠士. Xiangshan 香山 existed as an administrative unit from 1152 to 1925 CE. It was renamed Zhongshan xian 中山县 in 1925 in honor of Sun Yat-sen, who was born in the region. Jones’s origin and destination puts his travels and life on the margins of what Henry Yu has called the Cantonese Pacific. Yu has demonstrated the dominance of migrants from the Taishan area. Being from Longdu district in Zhongshan, Jones was most probably Hokkienese and spoke a local variant of Hokkien. As we will see later in the chapter, the core members of the Pingshe were all Zhongshan natives, and in a sense can be seen as a marginal group within the larger marginalized community of Chinese in the United States. See Henry Yu, “The Intermittent Rhythms of the Cantonese Pacific,” in *Connecting Seas and Connected Ocean Rims: Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans and China Seas Migrations from the 1830s to the 1930s*, eds. Donna R. Gabaccia and Dirk Hoerder (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011), 393–414.
[306] Avrich, *Anarchist Voices*, “Ray Jones”, 410. For an examination of migrants from Zhongshan and their transnational ties, see Yong Chen, “The Internal Origins of Chinese Immigration to California Reconsidered,” *Western Historical Quarterly* 28, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 520–546.
[307] Ibid.
[308] “Ray Jones Interview”, Him Mark Lai Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/80, Box 121, Folder 22.
[309] Ibid. In a 1950 letter, he commented to Agnes Inglis that he was getting along in age, fifty-eight years old then, and could only work a few short hours a week given his physical condition. Ray Jones to Agnes Inglis 3 January 1950, Agnes Inglis Papers, Joseph Labadie Collection, University of Michigan.
[310] So far, Jones appears in the donations ledgers for the anarchist journals, *Freedom*, *The Road To Freedom*, *Man!*, *Minzhong*, and *Spanish Revolution*. He also contributed money to *Spain and the World* and *War Commentary*, but these were the wartime versions of *Freedom* during the Spanish Civil War and World War 2.
[311] See “Booklists”, Ray Jones Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/46, Box 1, Folder 4. This particular folder contains a number of long book lists for items that Jones received, had in his personal possession, or stocked for distribution or sale. There are only about a dozen lists in the folder, but they range in date from 19401970. This overview does not consider other materials and lists Jones may have collected.
[312] See Chapter 2 for discussion and analysis of the content of these letters.
[313] Avrich, *Anarchist Voices*, “Red Jones”, 410. Ba Jin submitted an article under the name Renping 壬平 in the second issue. Names used include 黑浪, 芾甘, 佩竿, 春风, 鸣希, 亦鸣, 壬平, 李冷, 极了, and 甘宁.
[314] Yamaguchi also contends the main editing of the journal was initially done in France, where Ba Jin lived for 1927 and most of 1928, and later in Shanghai. Letters Jones received from Wu Kegang and Zhu Yongbang 朱永邦 as well as distribution addresses listed in the initial run of the journal confirm the importance of the France-based comrades. The composition of *Pingdeng* will be discussed further in later sections. For now, see Yamaguchi Mamoru, “Cong zazhi ‘Pingdeng’ kan wuzhengfu zhuyi sixiang kongjian de yuejing xing” 《从杂志《平等》看无政府主义思想空间的越境性》[Observing Anarchism’s Transnational Qualities in the Periodical *Pingdeng*], in *Hei’an zhi guang: Ba Jin de shiji shouwang* 《黑暗之光：巴金的世纪守望》[Dark Light: Ba Jin’s Century Watch], Kindle Book (Shanghai: Fudan University Press, 2017).
[315] Ray Jones Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/46, Box 1, Folder 12. Jones’s correspondence with Cuban anarchists presents the wider possibility of additional Latin American connections for further exploration.
[316] “Weihe er zhan” 《为何而战》 [Why go to war?], Ray Jones Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/46, Box 1, Folder 3. In Jones’s papers, there are about six drafts of this poem. Only one of the drafts is dated May 1945. The one that I translated above is one of the more polished versions. Among the drafts, the main difference appears in the final lines and the way they are phrased. However, in other drafts, Jones grouped this poem together with others, as if he were looking to possibly arrange a suite of poetry for a collection or a pamphlet.
[317] Jones’s script is by no means trained. His characters are rough and often times shaky. This could be as much a sign of his education as the physical demands of his work taking a toll on his finer motor skills. In any case, Jones had a voracious intellect, but in all likelihood did not come from a well-to-do educated family.
[318] In the text of the poem, the title is “Hei’an zhi guang ti Zhongshi cangshu” 《黑暗之光， 题中时藏 X 图书》.
[319] “Zhongshi cangshu” 《中时藏书》 [The Library of R. Jones], Ray Jones Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/46, Box 1, Folder 2.
[320] Indeed, it is unclear whether Jones ever published the numerous essay and poem drafts collected in his papers. In examining the pages of *Pingdeng*, Jones appears as a phantom. He is a comrade who is occasionally addressed in open letters, but never one who appears on author bylines.
[321] This reading falls in line with Jane Mee Wong’s take in her article on Jones and the Pingshe. Writing as an AsianAmerican activist, Wong emphasizes the legacies and resources that Jones and his comrades provided in terms of inspiration, rhetoric, and vision. She ends her article with “Library of R. Jones”, setting out her own call to arms. See Wong, 143.
[322] Ray Jones to his Father, 28 February 1922, Ray Jones Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/46, Box 1, Folder 1.
[323] Ray Jones, “Sangli de zhidu yinggai pochu” 《丧礼的制度应该破除》 [The Funerary System Should be Eliminated], Ray Jones Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/46, Box 1, Folder 1.
[324] In a note to the draft, Jones, like the essay draft discussed prior, titled his letter “Mixin pochu” 《迷信破除》. Jones seems to write for an audience beyond the immediate recipient in mind, for after explaining that he would mail the letter that day after editing, he stated that he “hoped the masses’ 大众 thought would advance.” Jones also refers to himself as Zhongming 钟鸣, as if to announce a warning. Ray Jones to Xiao Heya, Ray Jones Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/46, Box 1, Folder 1.
[325] Ibid.
[326] Ibid.
[327] Chow Tse-Tsung, *The May Fourth Movement* (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1960). Jones wrote on women’s liberation, but it is difficult to gauge the how directly Pingshe’s organizing engaged women workers, who were increasing in numbers. This seems to be a larger issue faced by Jones, Ba Jin, Lu Jianbo, and other anarchists discussed in this dissertation. Ba Jin wrote on women revolutionaries, and Lu Jianbo collaborated with his wife, Deng Tianyu in writing on women’s issues, but gender and labor are largely unaddressed. This is not to say that Chinese anarchists as a whole ignored gender. He-Yin Zhen 何殷震 was a notable anarchist and feminist, but outside her writings, there are no known explicitly Chinese anarchist theorizations of gender. See Lydia H. Liu, Rebecca E. Karl, and Dorothy Ko, eds., *The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory* (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
[328] The known individuals from Ba Jin’s immediate circle are Wei Huilin, Wu Kegang, Bi Xiushao, and Zhu Yongbang. There is also reason to believe Lu Jianbo, towards the end of *Pingdeng*’s run, published an article.
[329] There is very little on Chen Shuyao available. At this moment, the only quasi-reliable source is a Baidu stub. See “Chen Shuyao”, *Baike zhidao*, [[https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E9%83%91%E9%81%93%E5%AE%9E][baike.baidu.com]]. Something to consider is the longevity of an individual’s life versus their time as an active and visible anarchist. This is a problem encountered in exploring the life of a figure like Liang Piyun, whose anarchism is buried under later careers.
[330] Lai, *Chinese American Transnational Politics*, 58. Also see, Chen Shuyao, “Kannada huaren gonghui gaikuang” 《坎拿大华人工会概况》 [Overview of the Canada Chinese Labor Association], *Minzhong*, vol. 2, no. 3, 15 March 1927, 261.
[331] Chen; Creese, 39–41. Chen states the formation of the Canada Chinese Shingle Weavers Union was sometime in 1918. Creese and other American and Canadian labor historians put it at 1919.
[332] Chen.
[333] Indeed, the Canada Chinese Shingle Weavers Union contributed $40USD for the printing of the edition of *Minzhong* in which Chen’s history of the Association appears.
[334] “Ray Jones Interview”, Him Mark Lai Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/80, Box 121, Folder 22.
[335] Edward Krebs, *Shifu: Soul of Chinese Anarchism* (Boston: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 126.
[336] Lai, *Chinese American Transnational Politics*, 58.
[337] “Ray Jones Interview”, Him Mark Lai Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/80, Box 121, Folder 22. Lai also asked Jones questions about the presence of other influential Chinese in the community.
[338] Here, “white garments” refers specifically to “white shirts, white uniforms, cotton lingerie, bathrobes, smocks, and flannel wear.” See Him Mark Lai and Russell Jeung, “Guilds, Unions, and Garment Factories: Notes on the Chinese Apparel Industry,” *Chinese America: History and Perspectives* (2008): 4–5
[339] Ibid., 3. In his interview with Him Mark Lai, Jones noted the difficulty in getting newly hired female workers to organize within the Unionist Guild. See “Ray Jones Interview”, Him Mark Lai Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/80, Box 121, Folder 22.
[340] The Yeong Wo Association was a native place association for people from Xiangshan County. Chen and Zheng were both natives of the region, and moreover, the garment industry was dominated by individuals from Xiangshan, so the choice of venue worked on numerous levels. See Chen Shuyao, “History of Meizhou Gongyi Tongmeng Zhonghui,” trans. Him Mark Lai, *Chinese America: History and Perspectives* (2008): 27, n. 4. For a thorough overview of native place associations and how they could serve as sites of local connection in transnational environments, see Bryna Goodman, *Native Place, City, and Nation: Regional Identities and Networks in Shanghai, 1853–1937* (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
[341] Chen, “History of Meizhou Gongyi Tongmeng Zhonghui,” 25.
[342] Ibid., 26. The history Chen wrote originally appeared in issues 1–2 for *Kung Sing*, and given the tone, it did not appear to Chen and others that the guild would soon fade away. *Kung Sing* lasted for just two issues.
[343] *Kung Sing*, no. 1, 4. Ray Jones Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/46, Box 1, Folder 15. Chen Shuyao is list as a member of the Propaganda Department.
[344] *Kung Sing*, no. 1. Address appears on the front-page masthead along with information about submissions, subscription fees, and guild dues. Ray Jones Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/46, Box 1, Folder 15.
[345] Pingshe used the same 1129 Stockton Street address as its point of contact. Jones even occasionally received mail there. In the 30s and 40s, the address continues to appear on the address stamp in their distributed literature. In her memoirs, anarchist labor organizer, Rose Pesotta, describes meeting Chinese activists in a similar office. See Rose Pesotta, *Bread upon the Waters* (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1945), *The Anarchist Library*, accessed 29 September 2020, [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/rose-pesotta-bread-upon-the-waters][theanarchistlibrary.org]]. Thanks to Kenyon Zimmer for pointing me to this.
[346] At this particular meeting, Huang Rushan gave a speech along with Feng Ziyou 冯自由 (1882–1958) and Huang Bihun 黄璧魂 (1886–1923). Not much is available about Huang Rushan, but Feng was an important member of the overseas Chinese community and Tongmenghui member. He later wrote a memoir of his experiences in the revolution. Huang Bihun was a feminist activist who set up a women’s school in Guangzhou in the early 1920s.
[347] Only the first issue of *Kung Sing* was available. Him Mark Lai had access to a 2nd issue at some point.
[348] From the text and the translation from *Industrial Solidarity* that follows, it is apparent the Chinese Seaman’s Union in question was the Chinese Seaman’s Union 中国海员工业联合总会 that led the 1922 Hong Kong strike that crippled the colony’s shipping industry and resulted in a twenty-percent raise for workers. *Industrial Solidarity* was printed in Chicago from 1921 to 1931. It later merged with *Industrial Worker*, the long-lasting official publication of the IWW. See the University of Washington’s IWW History Project website’s section on Wobbly newspapers for further information: [[https://depts.washington.edu/iww/newspapers.shtml][depts.washington.edu]]
[349] The 1919 California Criminal Syndicalism Act followed in the footsteps of the post-WWI Red Scare and responded to a wave of militant lWW labor actions as wells bombings and other attacks. California was one of over twenty states that passed such bills. Essentially, the Criminal Syndicalism Act criminalized syndicalism and enforcement of the act turned on alleged membership in any radical syndicalist group like the IWW. See Woodrow C. Whitten, “Criminal Syndicalism and the Law in California: 1919–1927,” *Transactions of the American Philosophical Society* 59, no. 2 (1969): 3–73.
[350] Chinese Seaman’s Union, “Zhongguo haiyuan hui zhi meiguo baojie ji zibenjia shu” 《中国海员会致美国报界及资本家书》 [A Letter from the Chinese Seaman’s Union to the American Press and Capitalists], *Kung Sing*, no. 1, 6. Ray Jones Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/46, Box 1, Folder 15.
[351] “Shijie gongyi dang qingzhu shijie datong” 《世纪额工艺党庆祝世界大同》 [The IWW Celebrates International Solidarity], *Kung Sing*, no. 1, 6–7. Ray Jones Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/46, Box 1, Folder 15.
[352] Ibid.
[353] “Shijie gongyi laodong zhe tongmenghui xuanyan gailve” 《世界工艺劳动者同盟会宣言概略》 [Summary of the IWW Manifesto], *Kung Sing*, no. 1, 6. Ray Jones Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/46, Box 1, Folder 15. The full text of the preamble can be read at the preamble to the IWW constitution can be read at the IWW website: [[https://www.iww.org/culture/official/preamble.shtml][www.iww.org]]
[354] Chen Shuyao’s experience in Vancouver with the Chinese Labor Association is illustrative, but the background of his ideological positions remains unknown for now. Zheng Bi’an, from his time with Shifu, was deeply involved in the initial stirrings of radical trade unions in China. Together, they had worked to help organize some of the first unions in Guangzhou. See Krebs, *Shifu: The Soul of Chinese Anarchism*.
[355] Lucien van der Walt and Michael Schmidt, *Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism* (Oakland and Edinburgh: AK Press, 2009). Of course, there are the very prominent examples of the CGT in France, the CNT in Spain, and the FAUD in Germany. The IWMA held a 1922 conference in Berlin to bring anarcho-syndicalist unions together. The proceedings of this conference were translated and published in Chinese journals like *Minzhong* and *Minfeng*.
[356] The exact nature of the IWW’s anarchism is up for debate. From its founding in 1905, there have been a variety of ideological positions and stances the IWW took. For a time, some of its members had flirted with communism and even the Comintern attempted to co-opt it. Kenyon Zimmer, e-mail message to author, 13 February 2020. The IWW currently disavows associations with anarcho-syndicalism or any other strains of anarchism. See *Myth #8* on current IWW website: [[https://www.iww.org/history/myths/8][www.iww.org]]. However, some like Kenyon Zimmer argue that the anarchist identities of various IWW locals remain obscured due to their being hidden in non-English publications. Zimmer asserts that much IWW-related scholarship focuses on English language sources, most of which have avoided the topic, and that a closer examination of non-English IWW publications reveals the deep influence of anarchists. See Kenyon Zimmer, “A Cosmopolitan Crowd: Transnational Anarchists, the IWW, and the American Radical Press,” in *Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW*, eds. Peter Cole, David Struthers, and Kenyon Zimmer (London: Pluto Press, 2017): 29–34.
[357] From Jones’s recollection, there had been little interaction between the IWW and the Unionist Guild. However, Chinese workers did participate in IWW sponsored activities. He further mentioned there had been a great number of Italian IWW members. Given Zimmer’s points above, this could be another point of contact made between the later Pingshe and what would become the IG.
[358] This date comes from a Pingshe member who published a brief English-language history in the pages of *Man!*. See R. Tong, “The Chinese Anarchist Movement in the USA,” *Man!,* vol. 1, nos. 8/9 (August-September 1933), 8. Joseph Labadie Collection, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan. However, as discussed below, there is reason to believe that there may have been a proto-Pingshe group in existence before 1925. As of now, the only account giving 1925 as the starting date is the English-language article in *Man!*. Any further information as to how the Pingshe formed would need to be dug up in Chinese language materials.
[359] “Ray Jones Interview”, Him Mark Lai Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/80, Box 121, Folder 22.
[360] Ibid.
[361] “Juanzhu kelupaotejin quanji diyi juan yinfei zhe” 《捐助克鲁泡特金全集第一卷印费者》 [List of Individuals Who Made Donations to the Printing Funds for Volume One of *Kropotkin’s Complete Works*], *Minzhong*, no. 13, September 1925.
[362] “Juanzhu kelupaotejin quanji yinfei zhe” 《捐助克鲁泡特金全集印费者》 [List of Individuals Who Made Donations to the Printing Funds for *Kropotkin’s Complete Works*], *Minzhong*, no. 15, June 1926.
[363] There seems to be a mistake the way the editors or printers of *Minzhong* transcribed the group’s acronym. Both ‘ILW’ and ‘The Labor World’ are handwritten within the pages of the journal. When the article reveals that ‘The Labor World’ is what ‘ILW’ stands for. It appears the ‘T’ in ‘The Labor World’ has been marked over to read as an ‘I’. For now, ‘ILW’ will suffice in discussion of this group.
[364] “Meiguo ILW de lishi jiqi jinxing” 《美国 ILW 的历史及其进行》 [America’s ILW, Its History and Activities], *Minzhong*, no. 15, June 1926.
[365] Ibid. The books and pamphlets mentioned were all central texts to a majority of Chinese anarchists. Kampf’s *On the Eve* proved to be an inspiration to anarchists like Ba Jin. Shifu’s “Wuzhengfu qianshuo” was such an essential text, it seemingly never went out of print. *Pingdeng* and Jones would always seem to have copies printed and ready. Copies of some of these booklets survive in the Him Mark Lai Papers and will be discussed in later section of this chapter.
[366] Ibid.
[367] Ibid. In the text, Chen erroneously lists the May 30th Massacre as happening in 1924. It happened in 1925 as student protesters were fired upon by British police in Shanghai’s International Settlement. This sparked a wave of riots, boycotts, and strikes and is seen as a seminal incident in the development of Chinese nationalist and labor movements. See Stephen A. Smith, *Like Cattle and Horses: Nationalism and Labor in Shanghai, 1895–1927* (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002), especially Chs. 9–11 for further information.
[368] For the moment, because we only have Chen’s brief account to go on as to the existence of the ILW, this paper will treat its existence as a hypothesis. It does not show up in Jones’s recollections or any other accounts. Curiously, Him Mark Lai writes that Pingshe was formed in 1921 and lasted up until the eve of WWII. In his notes, he cites his interview with Jones in 1973, but in the existing transcripts, neither of these dates are mentioned. See Lai, “Chinese American Transnational Politics”, 60. Another explanation could be this was a group within the Unionist Guild.
[369] “Jieshao lufa gongyu zazhi” 《介绍旅法公寓杂志》 [An Introduction to France’s *Gongyu*], *Kung Sing*, vol. 1 (1924): 1, Ray Jones Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/46, Box 1, Folder 15.
[370] *Gongyu* ceased publication later in 1924 as the initial group of anarchists in France had moved over to other ventures and they lost ground to the communist adherents in ideological debates. See Marilyn Levine, *The Found Generation: Chinese Communists in Europe during the Twenties* (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993).
[371] Jones described Chen Shuyao as a “leading anarchist from Vancouver” in his interview with Him Mark Lai. See “Ray Jones Interview”, Him Mark Lai Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/80, Box 121, Folder 22 for further details.
[372] Ba Jin and Ray Jones’s correspondence from 1929 through 1930 contains much on the costs that *Pingdeng* accrued from printing to mailing. For example, expenditures on *Pingdeng* vol. 2, no. 1 was 19 yuan plus 6 yuan for mailing. This does not include printing costs. Ba Jin later mentioned printing 1000 copies of a translation of Berkman’s *ABCs of Anarchism* would be around 100 yuan. It was to manage these costs that Ba Jin and Jones discussed setting up their own printing press. See Chapter 2 for discussion of this from Ba Jin’s perspective. Also see Reed, *Gutenberg in Shanghai* (Vancouver: University of Vancouver Press, 2004) and Robert Culp, *The Power of Print in Modern China: Intellectuals and Industrial Publishing from the End of Empire to Maoist State Socialism* (New York: Columbia University, 2019), 62. Culp covers costs for larger presses in terms of recruiting editors. Obviously, *Pingdeng*’s editors dealt mostly with printing and distribution costs, but financial hardships and lack of remuneration was something common to all strata of the publishing industry.
[373] Avrich, *Anarchist Voices*, “Ray Jones”, 409. Jones and Zhongfu (who was arrested with Jones in 1928) together contributed an additional six dollars to the printing fund for *Minzhong*’s Kropotkin project in early 1927. Jones contributed an additional four dollars to *Minzhong* itself. There was also a forty-dollar contribution from the Canada Chinese Shingle Weavers Union. See *Minzhong*, vol. 2, no. 3, March 1927, 262.
[374] The *Chung Sai Yat Po* 《中西日报》ran from 1900–1951 and was one of the most popular Chinese language papers in the United States of its day. It began as a conservative publication but changed to a pro-republican stance in the 1910s after Yuan Shikai’s attempted enthronement. It and the Sai Gat Yat Po 《世界日报》were the two main Chinese papers in the Bay Area. See Lai, *Chinese News Papers*. The advertisements appeared in the November 29 edition of the *Chung Sai Yat Po*. The appearance of advertisements for *Pingdeng* in a mainstream publication is rather surprising, but such an occurrence should probably be examined in light of the social connections the members of the Pingshe held. Though Jones may or may not have had ties to the Chinese press, other members, like Chen Shuyao and Zheng Bi’an did.
[375] Chinese anarchists produced numerous histories of the Haymarket Bombings and their aftermath. Ba Jin was a notable producer of such histories and advocate for the Chicago martyrs. Numerous biographies of Kropotkin were also produced. Though Pingshe sold a great variety of printed materials, they also distributed a far greater number for free. The items advertised in *Minzhong* were no exception.
[376] In what is available of Ba Jin and Jones’s correspondence, the printing of issues of *Pingdeng* in Shanghai and shipping to San Francisco was a regular affair. See Chapter 2 for additional discussion. The reverse was also true. A Chengdu-based anarchist, Joe F. Sing 周辅成 （1911–2009）wrote to Jones circa 1928 requesting materials from Pingshe for use among the city’s various groups. As it would happen, Joe F. Sing, would go on to be an important philosopher and logician in the PRC.
[377] *Minfeng*, vol. 2, no. 2, March 1927. The Pingshe received copies of *Minzhong* as well. Within Ray Jones’s papers, there is a copy of one of *Minzhong*’s serials and a few other items that the Pingshe printed and distributed.
[378] *Pingdeng*, no. 1, July 1927, 30. Pingshe Materials, Him Mark Lai Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/80 Box 1, Folder 34.
[379] “Meiguo baogao” 《美国报告》 [A Report from America], *Minfeng*, vol. 2, no. 2, February 1927. In stating ‘that year’, the authors at *Minfeng* were referring to the lunar calendar. The Double Tenth also had significance as the reorganization of the GMD in 1919.
[380] Perry Link’s *An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics* (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013) has an excellent discussion on rhythm and slogans, but the meter used in the cited pamphlet does not fit in with Link’s analysis. These were six-character lines.
[381] Henrietta Harrison, *The Making of a Republican Citizen*, Chapter 3.
[382] “Meiguo baogao”, *Minfeng*, vol. 2, no. 2
[383] Ibid.
[384] The Chinese Laundry Workers Union is more commonly known by its Cantonese name, the Sai Fook Tong 西福党. The strike in question occurred in early 1929. It has been cited as an early example of a multicultural strike effort between Chinese and non-Chinese unions in the United States as non-Chinese unions joined the picket line in support of the Chinese laundry workers. Though it seems the Pingshe was not part of the organizing committee, they actively distributed propaganda in defense of the workers. See Lai, “Chinese American Transnational Politics,” 80.
[385] Pingshe, “Huagong jiefang de jihui dao le!” 《化工解放的机会到了》[The Chance for Chinese Worker’s Liberation has Arrived!”, 31 January 1929, Pingshe Materials, Him Mark Lai Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/80 Box 1, Folder 34.
[386] The ILGWU organized National Dollar Stores strike by garment workers was one of the longest strikes on record at the time. The National Dollar Stores factory was the largest garment factory in Chinatown at the time and employed primarily women. Organized through the ILWGU and supported by various leftist organizations, the garment workers won pay and hours concessions for the National Dollar Stores to close up shop and sell to another company, voiding the hard-won contract. See Lai and Russo, 5–6, Lai; “Chinese American Transnational Politics, 83; and Judy Yung, *Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco* (Berkeley: University of California Berkeley Press, 1995), 209–222.
[387] This is not to say that the Pingshe just recycled older leaflets for the 1938 strike. They did produce other original leaflets as well. A surviving example is “Jinggao quanti qiaobao” 《敬告全体侨胞》 [A Message to All Chinese Brethren], which was published on March 4, 1938. The text of this leaflet was quite long. It was an in-depth indictment of National Dollar Stores’ tactics to discredit the efforts of the Chinese female garment workers and ILGWU. Pingshe Materials, Him Mark Lai Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/80 Box 1, Folder 34.
[388] Pingshe, “Huagong jiefang de jihui dao le!”, 《化工解放的机会到了》 [The Chance for Chinese Worker’s Liberation has Arrived!”, 27 February 1938, Pingshe Materials, Him Mark Lai Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/80 Box 1, Folder 34.
[389] Some examples include 1932’s “Jinggao laodong minzhong” 《敬告劳动民众》, which used Japan’s attacks on Shanghai that year to link imperialist aggression and rampant capitalism; an undated pamphlet, “wuzhengfu dang yu gongchan dang bu tong” 《无政府党与共产党不同》, and “Wuyi jinian ri jinggao minzhong” 《五一纪念日敬告 民众》，both of whose titles explain their messages. The Him Mark Lai Collection holds 12 pamphlets, including two special edition booklets.
[390] It is worth it to note here that the authors who participated in this back and forth, such as Ba Jin, Shen Zhongjiu, Wu Kegang, and others, were all either in China or France at the time these articles were written. This was another example of the transnational character of the Pingshe and *Pingdeng* and how the Trans-Pacific network operated.
[391] Zheng Bi’an, “Meizhou tongzhi de huodong” 《美洲同志的活动》 [Activities of American Comrades], *Minzhong*, vol. 2, no. 3, March 1927, 260. Between the publication of Zheng’s letter in March and the appearance *Pingdeng*, there was a special May 1st publication from the Pingshe. Articles included in the table of contents were: 《五一》，《五一与平社》，《无政府主义与五一运动》，《我们为什么要纪念五一》，《五月一日》，《劳动者自己底力量》，《破坏劳动团体的罪恶》，《算账》，《劳动歌》，《无政府党消息》. The surviving copy within the Him Mark Lai Papers is incomplete and only has pages 1–10 and 14–17. The second article, 《五一与平社》, was written by Chen Shuyao. This piece emphasized the importance of May 1st in terms of the labor movement and other emancipator movements, but he made an impassioned plea that this pamphlet’s purpose was not to educate workers on the meaning behind May 1st, but to win the sympathies of readers to the activities of the Pingshe. See Pingshe, “May Day Special Publication”, Pingshe Materials, Him Mark Lai Papers, AAS ARC 2000/80 Box 1, Folder 34.
[392] Yamaguchi Mamoru has a complete table of all *Pingdeng’s* issues including article titles. See Yamaguchi, “Observing”. Advertisements for the journal later appeared at the end of the month in *Chung Sai Yat Po*.
[393] “Ben kan qishi” 《本刊启事》 [An Announcement], *Pingdeng*, no. 1, July 1927, 29, Pingshe Materials, Him Mark Lai Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/80 Box 1, Folder 34. *Pingdeng* remained free of charge for almost the entirety of its existence. Only after Ba Jin and the main editing group moved to Shanghai in 1929 did the Pingshe begin to charge for each issue. Books and pamphlets printed by the Pingshe remained free of charge while books and materials sent from China were sold for funds. The change in costs is never spelled out, but given the group’s financial difficulties, it is not too surprising, especially with the content becoming more ‘literary’ inclined.
[394] Refer to n. 46 in this chapter for Yamaguchi Mamoru’s arguments as to how *Pingdeng* was put together. While largely in agreement with Yamaguchi as to where the main editing of the journal took place, this author feels he underestimates the contribution of the San Francisco group, especially regarding the news sections.
[395] This count was made from Yamaguchi’s list. Altogether, 34 articles in *Pingdeng* carried his byline, and with few exceptions, each issue contained at least one article by him.
[396] According to Jones’s interview with Avrich, *Pingdeng* was sent to various locations across China and the United Sates, but from correspondence collected in his papers, they at least sent materials to Cuba and possible other locations in the Americas as well. See letters Ray Jones received from Chinese anarchists in Cuba. Ray Jones Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/46, Box 1, Folder 12.
[397] “Benkan daii chu” 《本刊代理处》 [Contact Addresses], *Pingdeng*, no. 1, July 1927, 30, Pingshe Materials, Him Mark Lai Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/80 Box 1, Folder 34. One thing that must be noted is that the CNBKSY digital archives and the Him Mark Lai Collections are missing issues 1 and 3–7. Further, some later issues are incomplete scans that are missing donations lists. As it stands, this is the last mention of the Chinese Labor Association that I have. Another facet to potentially consider is that *Pingdeng* listed the money it had secured to cover the costs for its first six issues. Among those who offered money were the *Chung Sai Yat Po*, the *Guomin Ribao* 《国民日报》, and the Shaonian Yinwu Shuju 少年印务书局 (where Zheng Bi’an occasionally worked as a typesetter) from the San Francisco Chinese community. From Canada, the *Dachen Bao* 《大晨报》 contributed as well. In total, the Pingshe managed to raise over $1000 USD through a combination of loans and grants for their first 6 issues. By next June, they were $157 in the red.
[398] Tracing these extended threads of individuals would greatly enhance and situate our knowledge of Chinese anarchist activities and networks. At this moment, such a task is being planned for after the dissertation’s completion.
[399] Just a few months later, one of the *Road to Freedom’s* contributors, Joseph Spivak, visited Ray Jones’s apartment and spent some time with him and other Pingshe members. Spivak came away impressed by their dedication and the sheer amount of literature that Jones and his roommates had managed to cram in their tiny apartment. Members of the Pingshe even attended *Road to Freedom*’s annual conference in New York in 1928. There they gave a report outlining their activities, even including a brief summary of Jones’s March arrest. They also gave an update of current anarchist groups in China, naming Lu Jianbo’s Chinese Anarchist Youth Federation and another, the South China Anarchist Federation. See “The Chinese Anarchists in the 1920’s USA – The Equality Society”, *Kate Sharpley Library*, [[https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/wdbsxk][www.katesharpleylibrary.net]], accessed 20 January 2016.
[400] “Zhuci xielu” 《祝词偞录》 [Lines of Congratulations], *Pingdeng*, no. 1 (July 1927), 28–29, Pingshe Materials, Him Mark Lai Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/80 Box 1, Folder 34. Jones later told Him Mark Lai the Los Angles and New York groups did not have many members. However, the names of Los Angeles Chinese anarchist groups occasionally appeared in the publication information on the reprints issued by the Pingshe.
[401] “Ray Jones Interview”, Him Mark Lai Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/80, Box 121, Folder 22.
[402] The tension between ideologies and movements is of particular concern for anarchist scholars. Iain McKay describes the study of anarchism as a dichotomy between ‘sages and movements’. Heretofore, the majority of scholarship on anarchism has focused in its intellectual aspect and has either taken the form of either biographies of leading thinkers like Kropotkin and Bakunin, or been cast in a broad, overarching intellectual histories, a la George Woodcock and James Joll’s seminal works. Works by scholars who came out of anarchist movements, such as Murray Boochkin and Frank Mintz have focused more on the activities and campaigns of anarcho-syndicalist movements. More recent anarchist studies scholars, many of whom continue to come out of various anarchist movements have attempted to ally these two different strains and incorporate methodologies from cultural studies. These more recent approaches are what McKay has in mind when he suggests that anarchist studies balance the idea with the workers who organized around it and practiced it. See Iain McKay, “Sages and Movements: An Incomplete Peter Kropotkin Bibliography,” *Anarchist Studies* 22, no. 1 (2014): 66–101. See Frank Mintz, *Anarchism and Worker’s Self-Management in Revolutionary Spain*, trans. Paul Sharkey (Oakland: AK Press, 2013); Boochkin, The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years, 1968–1936James Joll, *The Anarchists* (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1964); and George Woodcock, *Anarchism* (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009).
[403] “Jin ri zhi shijie” 《今日之世界》 [The World *Today*], *Pingdeng*, no. 2 (August 1927): 13–14.
[404] Several issues of *Pingdeng* contain reports on international anarchist events. See no. 9 (March 1928), no. 10 (May 1928), no. 13 (August 1928) for examples.
[405] See Ba Jin and Jones’s exchanges in 1929 in the previous chapter for details on money Jones and Chen Shuyao would send over from North America. Once the second volume of *Pingdeng* began printing, donations lists seldom appeared in its pages, on the one occasion such a list did, one of the first names listed was a group from Los Angeles.
[406] Here I am taking my cue from Sebastian Veg’s discussion of grassroots intellectuals in the post-90s period as those outside the formal institutions, social hierarchies, and self-identifications that traditionally define intellectuals. As per Veg’s overview, Jones did not shirk universalist assumptions about morality, but he certainly did not take himself as belonging to a discrete and separate class that with arcane codes and hierarchies that claimed possession of the means of known moral truths. Jones saw himself as a worker and member of the community who fought on its behalf. See Sebastian Veg, *Minjian: The Rise of China’s Grassroots Intellectuals* (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019): Ch. 1 for an extended definition of the typologies of intellectuals that are currently employed. Classifications of who and what intellectuals are and what type of work they do has been an important facet of the historiography. Some important works include Hao Zhidong, *Intellectuals at a Crossroads: The Changing Politics of China’s Knowledge Workers* (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003) and Eddy U, *Creating the Intellectual: Chinese Communism and the Rise of a Classification* (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019). While the dynamics of who and what constituted an intellectual during Jones’s time were different from what Veg examines, we should not discount the presence of individuals who did intellectual work outside accepted channels and identities. In this, perhaps it is helpful to incorporate vocabularies and definitions from art history discussion of ‘outsider art’ and ‘outsider artists’. One key component to the identity of ‘outsider artists’ is they are not conscious of their creating art for consumption. It may be a stretch, but this can be applied Jones in his propaganda work and personal writings. He specifically saw himself as an anarchist, but he never viewed himself or work as consciously doing ‘intellectual work’ as a self-described intellectual would understand it. See Jan Jagodzinski, “In the Realm of the ‘Real’: Outsider Art and its Paradoxes for Art Educators, *The Journal of Social Theory in Art Education* 25 (2005): 233. However, there is danger in this as ‘outsider artists’ are often discussed in terms of mental illness and mania and attempts to use this in defining Jones can be exploitative.
[407] Spivak, from *KSL*. The Pingshe report at the 1928 *Road to Freedom* conference mentions efforts by reactionary elements of Chinatown society to have the group disbanded. A similar report appears in the February 1929 edition of *Pingdeng*. Titled “Women de baogao” 《我们的报告》 [Our Report], the text appears to be an almost word for word translation of the English text from the 1928 conference. One major difference is it does not mention Jones by name when speaking of American harassment. However, there’s no caption saying where this report came from. See *Pingdeng*, vol. 2, no. 2, February 1929, 18–19.
[408] “Ray Jones Interview”, Him Mark Lai Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/80, Box 121, Folder 22.
[409] Ray Jones Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/46, Box 1, Folder 20. Interestingly, the pamphlets in questions are dated 1932 (on the Japanese bombing of Shanghai) and 1941 (A May 1st commemoration), which fall outside the known dates of the group.
[410] Zimmer, *Immigrants against the State*, 184.
[411] David P. Chun was born in Honolulu, and raised in Guangzhou from 1905–1920, where he studied art. In 1920, he briefly returned to Honolulu, before heading to San Francisco in 1924. In 1935, Chun and others formed the Chinese Art Association 华人艺术协会. He sketched and painted numerous scenes of San Francisco and Chinatown. During the decade, he also participated in a Federal Arts Project to paint scenes of the Chinese community. He also took a number of lithography commissions. SC0929, California Asian American Artists Biographical Survey Records, Series 1, box 2, folder 7: David Chun. Dept. of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, Calif.
[412] See R. Tong, “The Chinese Anarchist Movement in the USA”, *Man!*, vol. 1, nos. 8–9, 1933; R. Tong, “Utopia”, vol. 2, no. 8, 1934; “China”, vol. 3, no. 2, 1935; Chung Shin, “The Chinese-Japanese War”, vol. 5, no. 7, 1937. This letter is directly addressed to Marcus Graham, and I have a hunch it could have been written by Jones. Chung Shin could easily be a typo for Chung Shih. But it would make more sense for his name to be signed Jones . Also see “The Chinese Anarchist Movement”, *Man!,* vol. 6, no. 7, 1938, Joseph Labadie Collection, Special Collections, University of Michigan.
[413] “A Chinese Monthly”, *Man!*, vol. 2, no. 8, 1934. Jones and company returned the favor that month, see “Qishi” 《启事》 [Announcement], *Anarcho-Communist Monthly*, no. 2, July 1938. for a brief announcement advertising *Man!* as edited by Marcus Graham. “Anarcho-Communist Monthly”, Him Mark Lai Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, AAS ARC 2000/80 Box 1, Folder 34.
[414] See discussions of Agnes Inglis’s relationship with Ba Jin and how they related to Jones in Chs. 2 and 6
[415] Agnes Inglis to Ray Jones, 22 December 1934, Agnes Inglis Papers, box 11.
[416] Prasenjit Duara, *Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China* (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 66. Duara provides a succinct definition of ‘bifurcated history’ on p. 66, but he goes into detailed discussion in Chapter 2.
[417] Indeed, Dirlik and Zarrow’s initial studies of Chinese anarchists came out during this period and both, in their own ways, sought to add depth to current understandings of the intellectual sources present within CCP ideology and Chinese politics at large. Yet, while both studies interrogated the CCP’s role in how China’s revolutions transpired, and despite their focus on the overseas importation of anarchist thought and practice into China, neither work really questioned whether the logical outcome of a revolutionary process had to be the nation-state. This is not to say Dirlik or Zarrow did not emphasize the tensions between the transnational and the national. Dirlik, for example, has written extensively on transnationalism as a concept, how it can be applied to Chinese historical experiences. See Arif Dirlik, “Transnationalism, the Press, and the National Imaginary in Twentieth Century China,” *China Review* 4, no. 1 (2004): 11–25 for one example. However, the narratives of Chinese anarchism presented in *Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture* and *Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution* are ultimately centered in China, the nationstate. Dirlik would later return to the anarchist narrative he helped set up and emphasized its transnational character, drawing attention to Li Shizeng’s later efforts to establish a school of ‘Qiaology’ 侨学. See Arif Dirlik, “Anarchism and the Question of Place,” in *Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870–1940*; and “Anarchism in Early Twentieth-Century China: A Contemporary Perspective,” *Journal of Modern Chinese History* 6, no. 2 (2014): 131–146. Also see a 1997 interview with Chuck Morse, “Dimensions of Chinese Anarchism: An Interview with Arif Dirlik,” *Libcom.org*, posted 27 February 2011, [[http://libcom.org/library/dimensions-chineseanarchism-interview-arif-dirlik][libcom.org]]. The transnational, trans local character of anarchist thought and practice have also been a focal point in the scholarship of Gotelind Müller-Saini. A concise distillation of Müller-Saini’s arguments can be seen in “Thinking Globally, Acting Locally” and “Anarchism and Glocalization”.
[418] Here I am following the convention used by Hwang Dongyoun in terming Liming as an advanced middle school rather than a high school. See Hwang, *Anarchism in Korea*, 44–48 and “Korean Anarchism before 1945: A Regional and Transnational Approach,” 117–122.
[419] Dirlik, *Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution*, 284–285. Dirlik’s description of anarchism in southern Fujian focuses on Chen Jiongmin’s activities in the late 1910s and early 1920s. Hwang offers another brief description in *Anarchism in Korea*, 44–48. A description of Chen’s life and relation to anarchist activities follows below.
[420] Here, the teleology of anarchist failure and Marxist success can be seen in Lu Zhe, *Zhongguo wuzhengfu zhuyi shi* 《中国无政府主义史》[A History of Anarchism in China] (Fujian: Renmin chubanshe, 1990) and Tang Tingfen, *Wuzhengfu zhuyi sixiang shihua* 《无政府主义思想史话》[A Brief History of Anarchist Thought in China] (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2011).
[421] Other individuals who taught at the schools include Wei Huilin 卫慧林 (1904–1992), Wu Langxi 吴朗西 (19041992), Zhu Xi 朱洗 (1900–1962), Yang Renpian 杨人楩 (1903–1973), and more. Many of the figures associated with Liming and Pingmin would go on to distinguished careers in the academy, publishing, translating, and the arts. Wei worked as an anthropologist in Taiwan and Zhu as a biologist with the Chinese Academy for Social Sciences. Yang was a historian of some renown.
[422] According to Martin Fromm, in his examination in *wenshi ziliao* projects conducted in the post-Mao northeast, the construction of *wenshi ziliao* was meant both as a form of professionalized, modern production of historical knowledge and a means to conduct political and ideological thought work. Participants were simultaneously encouraged to give their objective historical experiences but also frame their narratives with politically appropriate concepts. See Martin T. Fromm, *Borderland Memories: Searching for Historical Identity in Post-Mao China* (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019), Chapter 4. In reading the *wenshi ziliao* and memoir writings that make up much of the constructed narratives of the Liming, Pingmin, and Quanzhou anarchists, it is essential to keep in mind the various political framings of the stories regarding Ba Jin and other actors, i.e., what are the local, regional, and national interests that shape the narratives and how have these interests changed over time.
[423] This of course is what David Scott refers to when discussing his concept of the problem space: “what defines this discursive context are not only the particular problems that get posed...but the particular questions that seem worth asking and the kinds of answers that seem worth having.” See Scott, 4.
[424] The full Chinese title of the first festival was 纪念巴金先生诞辰 108 周年暨泉州市首届巴金文化节 *Jinian Ba* *Jin xiansheng danchen 108 zhounian ji Quanzhou shi shou jie Ba Jin wenhua jie*, or “The First Quanzhou Ba Jin Culture Festival in Memorial to Ba Jin’s 108th Anniversary.”
[425] Michel-Rolph Trouillot, *Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History* (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995), 116.
[426] Gu Yeping, “Lun Ba Jin de geming xushi yu Quanzhou 30 niandaide minzhong yundong.”
[427] Chen Jiangping, “Ba Jin de Quanzhou yuan ji qi wenhua yiyi.”
[428] Three of the more celebrated stories that include Quanzhou are “Nanguo de meng” 《南国的梦》, “Fa de gushi” 《发的故事》, and “Heitu” 《黑土》. See Chen Sihe, *Renge de fazhan* 《人格的发展》 [Progress of a Life] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1992), 137–150 for a detailed examination of his time in Quanzhou.
[429] Gu, “Lun Ba Jin de geming xushi,” 112–114.
[430] Jia Yumin, “Meili de jingshen jiayuan—guanyu Ba Jin yu an’naqi zhuyi de zai sikao”, 74; Yang Lili, “Wuzhengfu zhuyi de xinyangzhe dao jiechu de minzhu zhuyi zhanshi—cong Ba Jin de chuangzuo huodong kan qi sixiang zhuanbian guocheng”, 50.
[431] Jia, 74 and 76.
[432] Ba Jin, “Letter from Ba Jin to the CRIA [International Anarchist Liaison Commission, Paris], 18 March 1949,” Kate Sharpley Library, [[http://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/15dvhn][www.katesharpleylibrary.net]]. This letter was originally written in French. For the original French version, see Ba Jin to CRIA, March 18, 1946, in *Yijian xinbian*, 46–47.
[433] “Jinian Ba Jin xiansheng danchen 109 zhounian ji Quanzhoushi di er jie Ba Jin wen hua jie ju ban.”
[434] Ibid.
[435] “Jinian Ba Jin xiansheng danchen 109 zhounian ji Quanzhou shi di er jie Ba Jin wenhua jie kaimu shi zai wo xiao longzhong juxing.”
[436] Ye Feiying, beyond being compared to Jesus, was regarded as perhaps the reason Pingmin Middle School was regarded as more radical and better run than Liming. See Sakai Hirobumi, “Ba Jin yu Fujian Quanzhou”, 284–289 for an in-depth overview of Ye’s work ethic and radicalism.
[437] “Jinian Ba Jin xiansheng danchen 109 zhounian ji Quanzhoushi di er jie Ba Jin wen hua jie ju ban.”
[438] See Chen Xiuju, “’Ba Jin Liang Piyun zhuanti tese shuju ku’ jianshe shijian yu fansi” 《‘巴金梁披云专题特色数据库’建设与反思》[Construction of and Reflections on a ‘Specialized Ba Jin-Liang Piyun Database’], *Lantai shijie* (April 2012): 66; and Liang Jin’gu, “Qiantan kexue di baohu Ba Jin, Liang Piyun zeng shu” 《浅谈科学地保护巴金，梁披云赠书》[A Brief Discussion on Scientifically Preserving Ba Jin and Liang Piyun’s Donated Books], *Liming zhiye daxue xuebao*, no. 48 (2005), 54–55.
[439] Many of the articles published through Liming appear in its periodical *Liming zhiye daxue xuebao* 《黎明职业大学学报》 [Liming Vocational University Journal] in a special section on Ba Jun studies.
[440] See Chen Xiuju, “Ronghe xiaoyuan wenhua pinpai jianshe de gaoxiao tushuguan yuedu tuiguang—yi Liming zhiye daxue wei li” 《融合校园文化品牌建设的高校图书馆阅读推广——以黎明职业大学为例》[Utilizing Campus Cultural Brands to Implement a Reading Drive in Tertiary School Libraries: Liming as an Example], *Liming zhiye daxue xuebao*, no. 94 (Summer 2017), 62–64 is an example of how Ba Jin’s connections to the school have been used to promote various campaigns.
[441] “Quanzhou Chosen as ‘East Asian Cultural City,’” CCTV.com, last modified August 28, 2013, [[http://english.cntv.cn/program/cultureexpress/20130828/101617.shtml][english.cntv.cn]].
[442] Elizabeth Perry, *Anyuan: Mining China’s Revolutionary Tradition* (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 12.
[443] “Quanzhou Liming zhiye daxue yu chengli ‘Ba Jin yu Quanzhou’ chenlie shi” 《泉州黎明职业大学于成立‘巴金与泉州’陈列室》 [Quanzhou’s Liming Vocational University Desires to Establish a ‘Ba Jin and Quanzhou’ Exhibition Room], Sina.com, last modified December 16, 2013, [[http://mn.sina.com.cn/news/m/2013-1216/095567591.html][mn.sina.com.cn]].
[444] Ibid.
[445] “Jinian Ba Jin xiansheng danchen 109 zhounian ji Quanzhou shi di er jie Ba Jin wenhua jie kaimu shi zai wo xiao longzhong juxing.”
[446] Gu Yeping, “Quanzhou minzhong yundongzhong de Liming gaozhong yu Pingmin zhongxue”.
[447] As discussed in the previous section, Liming Vocational University has its own Ba Jin Studies Center and issues its own publications in that field. See n. 24. In the ‘Campus Culture’ section of the school website, it has a prominent section on Ba Jin Culture displaying recent reports on events at Liming involving Ba Jin. See [[http://www.lmu.edu.cn/html/968/][www.lmu.edu.cn]].
[448] James A. Cook, “A Transnational Revolution: Sun Yat-Sen, Overseas Chinese, and the Revolutionary Movement in Xiamen, 1900–1912,” in *Sun Yat-Sen, Nanyang, and the 1911 Revolution*, eds. Lee Lai To and Lee Hock Guan (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2011), 186–190.
[449] See Dirlik, *Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution*, 170–171 and 284–285. Also see Vivienne Xiangwei Guo, “Not Just a Man of Guns: Chen Jiongming, Warlord, and the May Fourth Intellectual (1919–1922),” *Journal of Chinese History* 4 (2020): 167–172; and Leslie H. Dingyan Chen, *Chen Jiongming and the Federalist Movement: Regional Leadership and Nation Building in Early Republican China* (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), Chapter Four for a thorough overview of Chen and anarchist efforts to reshape society in Zhangzhou. One thing that should be noted is that Chen is the youngest son of Chen Jiongming and as such as an interest in countering infelicitous narratives against his father.
[450] It’s important to note that Liu and Liang Bingxian, both from Guangdong, both had their own overseas connections and Liu, in particular, traversed these connections into the Nanyang as a teacher and editor. See Liu Shixin, “Guanyu wuzhengfu zhuyi huodong de diandi huiyi” 《关于无政府主义活动的点滴回忆》 [Bits of Recollections Regarding Anarchist Activities], *WSZX*, 934–937.
[451] Ibid., 935
[452] See Gu, “Quanzhou minzhong yundongzhong,” 34–35. Also see Sakai, 268–271
[453] Gu, “Quanzhou minzhong yundongzhong,” 33. Also see An Min and Xiao Zhong, eds., “Xiamen ‘Jiangsheng bao’” 《厦门《江声报》 (1927–1950)》 [Xiamen’s *Jiangsheng bao* (1927–1950)], in *Fujian xiandai zhongyao shiliao jieshao* 《福建现代重要史料介绍》 [An Introduction to Important Historical Materials in Modern Fujian], no. 2 (1996).
[454] Ironically, Li Houji’s expulsion from Fujian coincided with Sun’s efforts to defeat Chen Jiongming, who had taken up positions along the Fujian border. See Cook, “A Transnational Revolution,” 196, n. 37.
[455] Qin Wangshan, “Annaqi zhuyi zhe zai Fujian de yixie huodong—Wo yu annaqi zhuyi” 《安那期主义者在福建的一些活动——我与安那期主义》 [Various Activities of Anarchists in Fujian], in *Fujian Wenshi ziliao* 《福建文史资料》 [Literary and Historical Materials of Fujian] 24(1990), 190–192.
[456] “Fangwen Fan Tianjun xiansheng de jilu”, *WSZX*, 1040–1041.
[457] Chen Yishang and Wang Jiangshui, “Liming de guanghui: Tan Liang Piyun xiansheng zaoqi de jiaoyu sixiang” 《黎明的光辉：谈梁披云先生早期的教育思想》 [The Splendor of Liming: On the Early Educational Thought of Mr. Liang Piyun], *Liming zhiye daxue xuebao*, no. 1 (1992): 24.
[458] Another important benefactor for Liming was Zhang Zhen 张贞 (1884–1963), an important GMD old hand and leading general in southern Fujian. Like Xu and Qin, Zhang was another southern Fujian native. Zhang helped with funds for Liming as one of those involved with the Quan’an Automobile Company. See Gu, “Quanzhou minzhong yundongzhong,” 34.
[459] Ibid., 36.
[460] Qin, “Annaqi zhuyi zhe zai Fujian,” 182.
[461] Ibid., 192–193.
[462] Ibid.
[463] Sakai, 305–308; and Gu, “Quanzhou minzhong yundongzhong,” 43–47.
[464] Sakai, 284–289; “Fang Fan Tianjun xiansheng,” *WSZX*, 1047.
[465] Qin, “Annaqi zhuyi zhe zai Fujian,” 195–197.
[466] See Incognito, “The Chinese Anarchist Movement,” *MAN!* 6, no. 7 (1938): 3; and Chung Shin, “The Chinese-Japanese War,” *MAN!* 5, no. 7 (1937): 6, Joseph Labadie Collection, Special Collections Library, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan. Also see Chapter 6 for a discussion of Ba Jin and Lu Jianbo’s reports to international anarchists on the state of Chinese anarchist movements.
[467] Qin Wangshan’s identity can be one such example. A brief search for a biography of Qin returns an article arguing for Qin to not be confused as a GMD rightist as well as a reminiscence penned by his daughter that appeared in a paper aimed at Chinese migrant audiences. See Zhang Jiayu, “Qin Wangshan zai da geming shiqi guogong hesuo he qingdang wenti de gongguo shifei” 《秦望山在大革命时期国共合作和清党问题的功过是非》 [An Evaluation of the Issue of Qin Wangshan’s Actions Regarding GMD-CCP Cooperation and Party Cleansing during the 1925–1927 National Revolution], *Minnan wenhua shengtai baohu qu*, 16 August 2016, [[http://www.mnwhstq.com/szzy/qzwszlqwk/201608/t20160816_101465.htm][www.mnwhstq.com]] for an example of an article refuting assumptions that Qin was with the right-wing faction of the GMD. Also see Qin Youlian, “Yiguotaxiang tongxin kang ri” 《异国他乡同心抗日》 [With the Same Spirit as Those Back Home, Resisting the Japanese in a Foreign Country], *Fujian qiaobao*, 14 August 2015, [[http://www.cnepaper.com/fjqb/html/2015-08/14/content_11_1.htm][www.cnepaper.com]]. Perhaps better taken up in a separate study, but Qin Youlian’s telling of her father’s struggles against the Japanese in the Philippines is a reminder the transnational nature of China’s war against Japan.
[468] See Sakai, 311–314.
[469] It should be mentioned that as early as 1928, before Liming’s founding, anarchists were already critical of Labor University’s adherence to anarchist principles. In a scathing rebuke of the Labor University’s appropriation of nationalist symbols during the 1928 May Day celebration that appeared in *Pingdeng* in San Francisco, the author complains bitterly how attendees were called on to pay respects to the GMD’s flag, and then scathingly summarizes a speech by a school representative in which they suggest that workers should not demonstrate for an eight-hour day as China’s industry was too backwards and that workers should agitate against foreign capital and for Chinese capital. Needless to say, this did not go over well. See Zhuo, “Shanghai guoli laodong daxue xiao qingzhu yi jiu er ba nian de Wuyi jie de dianli he zhuci” 《上海国立劳动大学校庆祝一九二八年的五一节的典礼和祝词》 [Shanghai National Labor University’s 1928 May Day Ceremony and Commemorations], *Pingdeng*, no. 11, June 1928, 12–14.
[470] Here it is important to note that it is not only Fujian that holds cultural commemorations and celebrations of Ba Jin. Other celebrations have taken place in his hometown of Chengdu. Further, both Shanghai and Beijing have claim to the author as archival sites of his donated materials, with Shanghai in particular, as the place Ba Jin’s longest residence, is the location of his memorial home and home base of Chen Sihe, a Fudan professor and the acknowledged dean of Ba Jin studies in China.
[471] A critical point to make is that all three researchers have corresponded extensively with Ba Jin, adding a personal element to their work. Further, in the cases of Chen and Sakai, they both had met and or exchanged letters with Liang Piyun and other surviving Quanzhou anarchists. In some sense, this level of personal access directs research in a manner that must be further addressed.
[472] See Sakai’s conclusion on pp. 309–315 and Yamaguchi Mamoru’s essay, “Ba Jin yu Hengbin” 《巴金与横滨》 [Ba Jin and Yokohama] in the same collection, pp. 95–106.
[473] Again, this is essentially a distillation of the various stories, plots and details notwithstanding. Here, it is as if Quanzhou, Liming, and Pingmin work as a symbol or a trope within Ba Jin’s life and writings. See Fang Hangxian and Jiang Gang, eds., *Ba Jin yu Quanzhou* 《巴金与泉州》[Ba Jin and Quanzhou] (Xiamen: Xiamen daxue chubanshe, 1994), 194, which includes an appendix listing Ba Jin’s then known essays, short stories, and novels that incorporated scenes and persons from Liming and Pingmin. Notably, this list did not include Ba Jin’s writings on his Korean anarchist colleague, Yu Ja-myeong.
[474] Susumu Higuchi, “Quanzhou mintuan xunlian suo” 《泉州民团训练所》 [Quanzhou’s People’s Brigades Training Center”, in *Ba Jin yu annaqi zhuyi* 《巴金与安那期主义》 [Ba Jin and Anarchism] (Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe, 2016), 103–118. Susumu opens the essay by utilizing the exchange Ba Jin had with Xu Maoyong about the existence and efforts of anarchists in China. This is almost the same manner as his essay on Ba Jin’s interest in the Spanish Civil War. Refer back to Chapter 2, n. 97 for further information.
[475] Chen Sihe, 137–150. Chen frames Ba Jin’s time in Fujian as a moment of affirmation and transformation of the anarchist ideals that had shaped his life.
[476] Sakai’s work on Fujian and Ba Jin’s has generally been regarded as the most authoritative (see Müller-Saini, “Thinking Globally, Acting Locally”). His essay on Quanzhou anthologized in *Ba Jin de shijie* is a compilation of three earlier, shorter articles and nearly two decades of work. He sets out to give as holistic an account of the anarchists in Quanzhou as possible. However, this is only to serve as backdrop to the larger intellectual changes that Ba Jin went through in the early 1930s. Due to his thoroughness, Sakai gives as much room for the Quanzhou anarchists to speak as possible, but their voices still largely come from long reminiscences penned by Ba Jin. Further, in the end, Sakai argues that ultimately, the anarchists and Ba Jin transitioned from anarchist social revolution to an enlightened educational reformism. That the thrust of their aims changed is not a point which this dissertation wishes to debate. However, such a change in intellectual direction does not necessarily mean an abandonment or weakened commitment to anarchist ideals or activities. Quite simply, we cannot discuss the histories of Liming and Pingmin without discussing the anarchists and how their legacies live on in current iterations.
[477] Here, we must refer back to Martin Fromm’s definition of *wenshi ziliao* and how the testimonies of events at Liming and Pingmin are framed in regard to their politics and appropriateness.
[478] One of the main sources in which these materials appeared was *Liming Xueyuan Xinxi* 《黎明学园信息》 [Liming Academy Bulletin], put out by Liming University. These bulletins contained articles on happenings at the university as well as speeches and memoirs from Liang Piyun and others on the school’s history. The bulletins seemed to be aimed at recruiting both alumni and new students to the university. As such, they were divided between history, memoir, and reminiscence and outlining what the university’s goals would be. Additional publications put out by the Pingmin zhongxue minsheng nongxiao xiaoyou hui 平民中学民生农校校友会 in the 1980s and 90s provide another source of memorial literature.
[479] See *Ba Jin yu Quanzhou*. This anthology collects a range of scholarship from the 1980s and early 1990s on Ba Jin’s relationship to Quanzhou, Liming, and Pingmin. It includes early writings on the subject by Sakai Hirobumi and Chen Sihe. As outlined in Sakai’s introduction, the collection’s purpose is to gauge Ba Jin’s relationship to anarchism and how Quanzhou fits into his ideological development and identity.
[480] Gu, “Quanzhou minzhong yundongzhong,” 39–41; and Gu, “Lun Ba Jin de geming xushi,” 112–113; each provides a breakdown of propaganda and protest work undertaken by students at the school.
[481] Hwang, 45–48; and Qin Wangsheng, “Chaoxian he riben annaqi zhuyi zhe zai Quan binan yinqi de shijian” 《朝鲜和日本安那期主义者在泉避难引起的事件》 [The Affairs of Korean and Japanese Anarchists Who Sought Refuge in Quanzhou], in *Fujian wenshi ziliao* 24 (1990): 203–208.
[482] Ibid.
[483] See Hwang, *Korean Anarchism*, 45. Frank Hoffman describes Esperanto as both a main conduit for Korean anarchist activity and a primary vehicle for cooperation between Korean and Chinese anarchists. See Frank Hoffman, “Korean Anarchists, Esperantists, and Reading in History: The China Group” (unpublished manuscript, Cambridge, 1996), 48–55. Of particular importance, Hoffman has identified Yu Seo as the individual who first taught Ba Jin Esperanto.
[484] One was Iwasa Sakutaro 岩佐作太郎 (1879–1967), a Japanese anarchist with connections to San Francisco and Kōtoku Shūsui 幸徳秋水 (1871–1911). See Hwang, 46–47 and Zimmer, *Immigrants against the State*, 119–121.
[485] See Sakai, 278–283. Also see Lu Shouxiang, “Zai huachao ren annaqi zhu zhe yu Ba Jin” 《在华朝人安那期主义者与巴金》 [Ba Jin and Korean Anarchists in China], *Heilongjiang Shizhi* 《黑龙江史志》[Heilongjiang Chronicles], no. 199 (2009), 97–98 and He Miao, “Ba Jin he chaoxian wuzhengfu zhuyi zhe Liu Ziming” 《巴金和朝鲜无政府主义者柳子明》[Ba Jin and Korean Anarchist Yu Ja-myeong], *Gansu nongye* 《甘肃农业》[Gansu Agriculture University Journal], no. 240 (2006): 196–197. Also see Hoffman, 48–49.
[486] See Yeh Wen-hsin, *The Alienated Academy*, 139–142 and 153–161 for an overview of Shanghai University’s contentious founding and its radical environment.
[487] Chen Yishang and Wang Jiangshui, “Liming de guanghui,” 22–23.
[488] Chen Sihe, “Liang Piyun he ta de lixiang zhuyi—*Liang Piyun pingzhuan* xu” 《梁披云和他的理想主义—— 《梁披云评传》序》 [Liang Piyun and his Idealism—A Foreword to *A Critical Biography of Liang Piyun*], *Shucheng* 《书城》 [Book Town] (December 2015), 56–57. Here Chen offers a potential way to view Chinese anarchists: those who were animated by a romantic idealism and those who were shaped by a more pragmatic concern. This certainly helps put anarchists like Ba Jin into context, but as a definition of anarchists it may be a bit too limiting as it reduces the scope for authentic practice to the political sphere and neglects more personal forms of engagement.
[489] See Sakai, 275 and Xiao Ding, “103 sui de Liang Piyun: Fendou bian shi shenghuo” 《103 岁的梁披云：奋斗便是生活》[Liang Piyun’s 103 Years: Struggle is Life], *Zhong laonian baojian* 《中老年保健》[Middle Aged and Elderly Health] (November 2012), 54. Also see Haijiang xiaoyou hui, “Liang Longguang de haijiang jiaoyu sixiang yu shijian” 《梁龙光的海疆教育思想与实践》[Liang Longguang’s Haijiang Pedagogical Thought and Practice] *Liming zhiye daxue xuebao*, no. 1 (1992): 38.
[490] Liang also had a stellar reputation as a poet and calligrapher and is widely known within the overseas Sinophone world for his artistic talents, having published numerous editions of poetry and calligraphy. Liang’s stature in Macanese politics and society has in some ways transformed him into a Macanese subject, with a reminiscence written by anarchist litterateur Mao Yibo 毛一波 (1901–1996) and brief chronology of Liang’s life having been published in print and online through Macao’s Institute of Culture. Mao Yibo was born in Sichuan and studied at Shanghai University in the 1920s. There he gravitated towards anarchist thought and became acquainted with Liang and other notable anarchists including Shen Zhongjiu, Wu Kegang, and of course, Ba Jin. Mao’s reminiscence that was published in the English edition of Macao’s *Review of Culture* seems to have been translated from an essay composed in the late 1980s. See the “Meeting Points” sections in *Review of Culture*, nos. 33–34 (2003/2004) at [[http://www.icm.gov.mo/rc/viewer/20034/1316][www.icm.gov.mo]]. Accessed 1 May 2020. This essay also appeared in a 1992 special edition of *Liming zhiye daxue xuebao* dedicated to Liang Piyun as well as a 1996 issue of the Chinese edition of Macao’s *Review of Culture*. The “Meeting Points” section for *Review of Culture*, nos. 33–34 is dedicated to Liang Piyun and includes a brief chronology of his life.
[491] For example, in early issues of *Liming xueyuan xinxi*, announcements about Ba Jin’s donations of materials to the school’s proposed library and his nomination for literary awards were prominent. However, his presence was secondary to the voices of school alumni and teachers, and he never was granted the same platform to speak as Liang Piyun. There were never any special issues dedicated to Ba Jin.
[492] Chen Xiuju, “’Ba Jin Liang Piyun zhuanti tese shuju ku’” and Lin Jin’gu, “Qiantan kexue di baohu”.
[493] This is from the first half of the couplet. The Chinese reads, “这里还不是学校，宇宙才是真正的学校；我们并没有家庭，学校便是大众的家庭”. Quoted in Chen Yishang and Wang Jiangshui, “Liming de guanghui,” 22.
[494] Mao Yibo, “Liang Piyun congshi wenjiao gongzuo 60 zhou nian zhuci (jielu)” 《梁披云从事文教 60 周年祝词 （节选）》 [Excerpts from ‘Commemorating Sixty Years of Liang Piyun’s Work in Culture and Education’], *Liming zhiye daxue xuebao*, no. 1 (1992): 66–68.
[495] See Judith Suissa, *Anarchism and Education: A Philosophical Perspective* (Oakland: PM Press, 2010). Also see Xiang Hongzhuan, “Lida xueyuan: yi suo teli duxing de xuexiao” 《立达学园：一所特立独行的学校》 [Lida Academy: An Independent Unique School] *Zhong xiaoxue guanli* 11 (November 2009)： 42–44.
[496] See Haijiang xiaoyou hui, “Liang Longguang de haijiang jiaoyu sixiang yu shijian”, 39; and Xie Huimin, “Liang Piyun xiansheng de huaqiao jiaoyu sixiang yu shijian’ 《梁披云先生的华桥教育思想和实践》 [Mr. Liang Piyun’s Overseas Chinese Education in Thought and Practice], *Liming zhiye daxue xuebao*, no. 1 (1992): 41–43.
[497] Haijiang xiaoyou hui, “Liang Longguang de haijiang jiaoyu sixiang yu shijian”, 39.
[498] See Wang Jiangsui, “Lun Liang Piyun guanyu ‘siben, aiben, guben’ de changdao” 《论梁披云关于 ‘思本，爱本，固本’的倡导》 [On Liang Piyun’s Guiding Concepts of Rooted Thinking, Rooted Love, and Rooted Reinforcement], *Liming zhiye daxue xuebao*, no. 1 (1992): 34–37.
[499] Quanzhou’s place within the history of the Silk Road and its current position within the ongoing ‘One Belt One Road’ initiative is seen both in economic and soft power terms. On one hand, there is the ever-present goal of economic development and modernization. On the other hand, there is a chance to further develop and add to the city’s collection of *wenhua pinpai* a la Ba Jin. The city is currently under consideration for UNESCO World Heritage status, though any decision has been deferred as of 2018. See “Historic Monuments and Sites of Ancient Quanzhou (Zayton)” *WHC-UNESCO-Tentative Lists*, [[https://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/6073/][whc.unesco.org]], accessed 20 May 2020; “The Consideration by UNESCO of China’s Heritage ‘Ancient Quanzhou’ Is ‘Deferred’”, *CGTV News*, [[https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d3d414f3045544e78457a6333566d54/share_p.html][news.cgtn.com]], accessed 20 May 2020; and Stuart Heaver, “What Old Silk Road’s Terminus, Quanzhou, Tells Us about New One, Xi Jinping’s ‘Belt and Road Initiative’”, *South China Morning Post*, 27 February 2018, [[https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle][www.scmp.com]] /travel-leisure/article/2134741/what-old-silk-roads-terminus-quanzhou-tells-us-about-new.
[500] Chen Jincong, “Zhuancheng Liang Piyun haijiang jiaoyu sixiang peiyang ‘hai si’ jianshe rencai” 《传承梁披云海疆教育思想培养 ‘海丝’建设人才》 [Inheriting Liang Piyun’s Haijiang Educational Thought to Build ‘The Maritime Silk Road’ and Cultivate Talent], *Liming zhiye daxue xuebao*, no. 104 (2019): 11–19. Liang’s maxim in whole reads “唯在人与人间之己立立人，己达达人，唯在民族与民族间之协同上进，协力买进，以达于民族大同.” The first part of Liang’s maxim is adopted from Kuang Husheng’s motto for Lida Academy, which in turn originated in Confucius and the *Lunyu*. This phrase is verse 30 in the Yongye 雍也 chapter. See “Yongye,” *The Analects*, on *Chinese Text Project*, [[https://ctext.org/analects/yong-ye][ctext.org]].
[501] In some senses though, Liming and Pingmin’s narratives have received better treatment than those of the Labor University and Lida Academy. Though the Labor University is the subject of Ming K. Chan and Arif Dirlik’s *Schools into Fields and Factories*, it lacks the attraction of Ba Jin’s presence to rise further in the popular consciousness. Lida, which bore close links to Liming and Pingmin is the subject of even further scholarly neglect. Outside of its association with Feng Zikai, it remains understudied. See Geremie R. Barmé, *An Artistic Exile: A Life of Feng Zikai (1898–1975)* (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), for an introduction to Lida.
[502] See Kate Merkel-Hess, *The Rural Modern: Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican China* (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Charles Hayford, *To the People: James Yen and Village China* (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); and Guy S. Alitto, *The Last Confucian: Liang Shuming and the Chinese Dilemma of Modernity* (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979) are excellent examinations of village reconstruction movements.
[503] Paul G. Pickowicz, “Memories of Revolution and Collectivization in China: The Unauthorized Reminisces of a Rural Intellectual,” in Rubie S. Watson, ed., *Memory, History, and Opposition under State Socialism* (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1994): 127–147.
[504] In this respect, Liang’s narrative fits a common historiography of the commercial, cultural, and educational undertakings of overseas Chinese. See Yen Ching Hwang, *The Chinese in Southeast Asia and Beyond: Socioeconomic and Political Dimensions* (Singapore: World Scientific, 2008), especially Chapters 2, 3, 6, 9, and 11. This collection is a retrospective of Yen’s work and offers some representative examples of common themes within the historiography.
[505] An exploration of the place of education within anarchist thinking may be found in Suissa, *Anarchism and Education*.
[506] Here there perhaps exists an opportunity to expand the history of the dissemination of radical ideas and organizations along these networks, picking up from where Benedict Anderson ended *Under Three Flags*: *Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination* (London: Verso, 2006). Like other scholarship that focuses on overseas Chinese networks and radicalism, the 1911 Revolution and Sun Yat-sen are the two subject Anderson’s examination of Chinese radical transnationalism. Gregor Benton’s 2007 *Chinese Migrants and Internationalism* looks at individual cases of Chinese transnational radicals, but these individual studies are not theorized into an overarching narrative of Chinese transnational radicalism. Other recent works that look at radical transnationalisms have examined how individuals and factions navigated Comintern directives and politics, and in some cases formed their own separate radical networks. See Oleksa Drachewych and Ian McKay, eds., *Left Transnationalism: The Communist International and the National, Colonial, and Racial Questions* (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2020), especially Drachewych and McKay’s framing of the questions in the introduction. Anna Belogurova, whose chapter in the collection, “Nationalism and Internationalism in Chinese Communist Networks in the Americas,” has revealed an incredibly rich world of Chinese communist transnationalism, has written at length on the ways in which existing Chinese transnational networks, colonial nationalisms, and Comintern efforts merged across the Nanyang region. See Anna Belogurova, *The Nanyang Revolution: The* *Comintern and Chinese Networks in Southeast Asia, 1890–1957* (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019); “Network, Parties, and the ‘Oppressed Nations’: The Comintern and Chinese Communists Overseas, 19261935,” *Cross-Currents* 6, no.2 (2017): 558–582; “The Chinese International of Nationalities: The Chinese Communist Party, the Comintern, and the Founding of the Malayan National Communist Party, 1923–1939,” *Journal of Global History* 9, no. 3 (2014): 447–470; and “The Civic World of International Communism: Taiwanese Communists and the Comintern (1921–1931),” *Modern Asian Studies* 46, no. 6 (2012): 1602–1632.
[507] See Dongyoun Hwang’s 2018 AAS talk, “The Biggest Little Schools in the World: Liming Advanced Middle School and Anarchist Educational Experiments in China and Korea, 1929–1984.” Personal Communication with the author, 4 November 2019.
[508] Dirlik’s *Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution* has the best overview; see Ch. 7, especially 280–285. Also see his and Ming Chan’s work on the Labor University for an extended discussion of its fate..
[509] Both Zarrow and Dirlik’s conclusions offer elegies to anarchists and read equally as a final account of where the historical actors they discussed ended up and final ruminations on the latent place of anarchism within modern political thought and discourse in China. Both bring up the sub-current of anarchism in Mao’s thought and how that influenced the proceedings of the first few years of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Whether there lay a hidden anarchist strain in Mao’s thought has been a topic of much debate. John Rapp, in *Daoism and Anarchism: Critiques of State Autonomy in Ancient and Modern China* (London: Continuum, 2012), Ch. 6 comes down against such interpretations, arguing that the anarchic streak in Mao’s thought served more to maintain his place within the bureaucracy than to eliminate all fonts of authority and hierarchy. Anarchists too have investigated whether the CR contained potentially incipient anarchist strands. An example re-posted on Libcom.org in 2013 offers a generalized take: Donald Parkinson, “The Mythology of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and the Chinese Ultra-Left,” *Libcom.org*, accessed 27 June 2020, [[https://libcom.org/history/mythology-great-proletarian-cultural-revolutionchinese-ultra-left-donald-parkinson][libcom.org]]; the original was posted the same year on internationalcommunistconspiracy. wordpress.com, [[https://internationalcommunistconspiracy.wordpress.com/2013/08/22/the-mythology-of-the-greatproletarian-cultural-revolution-and-the-chinese-ultra-left/][internationalcommunistconspiracy.wordpress.com]] An interesting case is that of the 1967–1968 Ultra-Leftist Shengwulian group in Hunan during the CR, which has been painted variously as an anarchist-inspired critique of CCP attempts to reign in the Red Guards by anarchists sympathetic to their cause, sophisticated radicals who attempted to transcend Maoism’s bureaucratic side and resist efforts to restore a political center, as representative of a true proletarian voice that unfortunately could not overcome its faith in Maoist dogma, or as anarcho-bourgeois counterrevolutionaries by the Party. An example of an influential text produced by the group would be “Whither China?” by Yang Xiguang. An English translation can be found at Marxists.de, [[http://www.marxists.de/china/sheng/whither.htm][www.marxists.de]]. For an in-depth examination of Yang Xiguang, see Jonathan Unger, “Whither China?: Yang Xiguang, Red Capitalists, and the Social Turmoil of the Cultural Revolution,” *Modern China* 17, no. 3 (1991): 3–37. An anarchist assessment of the group would be John Welsh, “Shen-wu-lien: China’s Anarchist Opposition,” *Social Anarchism* 2, no. 1 (1981): 3–15. A generally negative overview of various ultra-leftist groups is Wang Shaoguang, “‘New Trends of Thought’ on the Cultural Revolution,” *Journal of Contemporary China* 8, no. 21 (July 1999): 197–217. The most thorough account of the Shengwulian group can be found in Chapter 5 of Yiching Wu, *The Cultural Revolution at the Margins: Chinese Socialism in Crisis* (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), particularly pp. 145–148 for a historiography of how the group has been treated by scholars and pp. 159–170 for Wu’s social typology of those who participated in the Shengwulian. An article length treatment of the episode with an additional historiographical overview in the conclusion can be seen in Yiching Wu, “The Great Retreat and its Discontents: Re-examining the Shengwulian Episode in the Cultural Revolution,” *The China Journal*, no. 73 (July 2014): 1–28.
[510] This is the main argument Turcato makes in “Italian Anarchism as a Transnational Movement,” 411–413. Anarchists were not wedded to a single location or base, and when oppressed in one area, they simply moved to another and re-established their operations. As Turcato asserts, the study of anarchism should be grounded in both the life stories and activities in individual anarchists, their networks, and how they disseminated their views.
[511] Here again we encounter the presence of Jacques Reclus as an educator and friend to anarchists in China. Jacques was the nephew of the influential anarchist geographer, Elisée Reclus, and son of Paul Reclus, anarchist engineer and educator. The Recluse family had numerous ties to Chinese anarchists. For one of the few treatments in English of Jacques Reclus’s time in China, see Chan and Dirlik, *Schools into Fields and Factories*, 133.
[512] One of the more important of these journals, *Chongjing*, will be covered later in the chapter. Esperanto still maintained a connection to anarchism and leftist activity in China at this time. See Gregor Benton and Gotelind Müller-Saini, “Esperanto,” in *Chinese Migrants and Internationalism: Forgotten Histories, 1917–1945*, ed. Gregor Benton (New York: Routledge, 2007), 92–114.
[513] Recent scholarship has pointed to this in mainly by looking at the lives of anarchist individuals and how new strains of anarchist thought emerged. As mentioned earlier, Davide Turcato’s “Anarchism as a Transnational Network” provides one of the clearest outlines of possible research agendas on how anarchists changed and adapted to cycles of repression and openness. Andrew Cornell’s *Unruly Equality US Anarchism in the Twentieth Century* (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016) charts developments and activities of US-based anarchists. Montse Feu’s essay on *España Libre* in Christopher J Castaneda and Montse Feu, eds., *Writing Revolution: Hispanic Anarchism in the United States* (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019), 245–257 looks at the activities of exiled Spanish anarchists in the 50s and 60s. Dongyoun Hwang examines the roles of Korean anarchists in post-WWII conflicts in the Korean peninsula in *Anarchism in Korea*. Many of the more venerable anarchist periodicals such as *Freedom* (English), *Freie Arbeiter Stimme* (Yiddish), *L’Adunata dei Refrattari* (Italian), *Tierra y Libertad* (Spanish), *La Protesta* (Spanish), continued to publish long after the war ended. Treating these journals as a part of a transnational anarchist print culture may yield interesting histories of maintained and expanded anarchist connections and activities.
[514] The source of these initial contacts seems to be in Lu’s publishing of a “Declaration of Chinese Anarchist Youth” in the Barcelona-based *La Revista Blanca* in 1927. This declaration was later picked up by *Avante* an anarchist paper published by Librado Rivera in Tampico, Mexico. Lu’s connections to *La Revista Blanca* are discussed in the introduction and will be re-examined in the next chapter in light of Lu’s efforts to rebuild his anarchist networks after the war.
[515] Specifically, Lu’s networks and connections and how they enabled his continued anarchist activities and publications reinforce Turcato’s assertion that the cyclical nature of anarchist activity was not that of a series of
[516] Sakai Hirobumi, “Ba Jin yu Quanzhou,” in Yamaguchi and Sakai, eds., *Ba Jin de shijie*, 308–311.
[517] Ibid., 314.
[518] Of course, this fits in with broader May 4th narratives of education reform and elite universities and the adoption of Deweyian models of pragmatic and democratic education. However, as the last chapter has shown, through the examples of Liming and Pingmin, there existed a vast body of anarchist practice in education and numerous examples of attempts at realizing visions of anarchist schools that would reshape the lives of working-class students.
[519] See Chapter 2 for discussion of Ba Jin’s correspondence with Emma Goldman.
[520] Ba Jin, “Farewell to Anarchism,” in *On Anarchism and Terrorism*, trans. Paul Sharkey (Sussex, UK: Christie Books, 2013), Kindle Edition. This is an afterword to the 1978 edition of his selected works. It reads ostensibly as a paean to the correctness of the Marxist line but Ba Jin’s tone also contains doubts about joining in any one school or movement. As discussed elsewhere in the dissertation, Ba Jin, sometime in the early 1930s, would cease considering himself an anarchist, but continued to sympathize with anarchist ideals.
[521] Refer back to Chapter 3 for a more in-depth overview of his trans-Pacific publishing activities.
[522] Yamaguchi Mamoru and Angel Pino are probably the two most prominent scholars working to trace and match Ba Jin’s lived experience into his written fiction and memoiristic writings. Together, they have traced the extent of Ba Jin’s translation of radical authors from Russia, Western Europe, and North America, creating a corpus of annotated texts and bibliographies.
[523] Yamaguchi Mamoru, “Ba Jin yu Xibanya neizhan” 《巴金与西班牙内战》 [Ba Jin and the Spanish Civil War], in *Hei’an zhi guang*
[524] Deng Jun, “Zhizao xiwang: 1920 niandai zhongdongsheng de shijieyu xiangxiang” 《制造希望：1920 年代中等生的世界语想象》 [Creating Hope: Mid-Level Students Image of Esperanto in the 1920s], *Xueshu yuekan*, 49, no. 9 (2017): 165
[525] Müller-Saini and Benton, “Esperanto”, 109–110.
[526] Bai Yangshu, “Shijieyu yundong zai Sichuan de fazhan” 《世界语运动在四川的发展》 [The Esperanto Movement’s Development in Sichuan], *Tianfu xinlun*, 15 June 1984, 26–29.
[527] Ibid.
[528] Qi Ya’nan and Luo Yihe, “Lu Jianbo: Ba Jin yan zhong de Zhongguo ‘Gandi’” 《卢剑波——巴金眼中的中国甘地》 [Lu Jianbo: China’s Gandhi in Ba Jin’s Eyes”, *Chengdu Ribao*, 13 Feb 2012.
[529] *Chongjing* ran for a total of 24 issues and, according to its masthead, was sold in a variety of locations across Chengdu, including the Chengdu-branch of Kaiming Bookstore. The publication’s main contact was Li Jianmin, another veteran anarchist who had been involved with the *Minzhong* group. See Dirlik, *Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution*, 20.
[530] *Chongjing* 《憧憬》, vol. 1, no. 5, July 10, 1933, 5–6.
[531] See Parks Coble, *Facing Japan: Chinese Politics and Japanese Imperialism, 1931–1937* (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
[532] Torsten Weber, *Embracing ‘Asia’ in China and Japan: Asianism Discourse and the Contest for Hegemony, 19121933* (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018), 140–152 outlines the beginnings of shared discourses of Asianism between Chinese and Japanese intellectuals and how that discourse came to be racialized.
[533] Of course, this was not the only vision of internationalism within Japan. Japanese anarchists like Yamaga Taiji and Iwasu Sakutaro sought out cooperative ventures with anarchists throughout Asia. Such cooperation included Iwasu’s participation with Korean, Chinese, and Taiwanese anarchists to establish the Oriental Anarchist Federation. See Introduction and Chapter 4 for further information.
[534] Craig Smith, “Chinese Asianism in the Early Republic: Guomindang Intellectuals and the Brief Internationalist Turn”, *Modern Asian Studies*, vol. 53, no. 2 (2019): 594–596 and 600–604; and his “China as Leader of the Weak and Small: The *Ruoxiao* Nations and Guomindang Nationalism”, *Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review*, vol. 6, no. 2 (2017): 537–542.
[535] Maggie Clinton, *Revolutionary Nativism: Fascism and Culture in China, 1925–1937* (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017), Chapter 2.
[536] Ibid. Also see Lloyd Eastman, *The Abortive Revolution: China under Nationalist Rule, 1927–1937* (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), particularly the chapter on the Blue Shirts and New Culture Movement for one of the first substantive treatments of the subject.
[537] Clinton, 167–181.
[538] Weber, 279–286.
[539] Fascist or fascist inspired political movements were not just limited to European and Japanese phenomenon. In addition to pointing out the fascist undertones of the above-mentioned GMD New Life Movement, scholars have long drawn attention to fascist parties in the United States, Britain, and elsewhere. Outside of these known examples, fascist thought and politics could be found in numerous groups, both revolutionists and authoritarian states. See Marzia Cosolari, “Hindutava’s Foreign Tie-up in the 1930s: Archival Evidence”, *Economic and Political Weekly* 25, no. 4 (2000): 218–228 for demonstrations of how Hindu nationalism drew from European fascist doctrines. In the Latin American context, Getulio Vargas’s (1882–1954) Estado Novo (1937–1945), and its corporatist authoritarianism is most often brought up as an example of fascist ideologies and politics in Latin America. See Antonio Costa Pinto, *Latin American Dictatorships in the Era of Fascism: The Corporatist Wave* (London: Routledge, 2019). See Chapter 10, “The New State of Getulio Vargas”.
[540] Helen Graham, *The Spanish Civil War, a Very Short Introduction* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 6–8. Two other authoritative scholars on the Civil War in English are Stanley Payne and Paul Preston. See Stanley Payne, *The Spanish Civil War* (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 10–11; and Paul Preston, *Revolution and War in Spain* (London: Routledge, 1984). Graham’s handbook incorporates the findings of Payne and Preston, as all as the work of others, in a fairly straightforward manner. However, none of the three books cited really delve into the Primo de Rivera dictatorship. Alejandro Quiroga, *Making Spaniards: Primo de Rivera and the Nationalization of the Masses, 1923–1930* (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007) offers a more nuanced and detailed analysis of this important period..
[541] Graham, 7–13.
[542] Graham, 9. Stanley Payne, *Fascism in Spain, 1923–1977* (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999) is another excellent resource.
[543] Graham, 24.
[544] Franco essentially created his own Falangist party, the Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Socialista (FET y de las JONS), in early 1937, combining the rumps of the remaining older Falange and other conservative groups. See Payne, *Fascism in Spain,* 121–126.
[545] Graham, 33–36.
[546] R. Dan Richardson, *Comintern Army: The International Brigades and the Spanish Civil War* (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1982), 30–42.
[547] Evans, *Revolution and the State:* , 31–39.
[548] Frank Mintz, *Anarchism and Worker’s Self-Management in Revolutionary Spain*, trans. Paul Sharkey (Oakland: AK Press, 2013) is one of the few monographs to examine the collectives.
[549] Evans, 31–39.
[550] Sam Dolgoff, ed., *The Anarchist Collectives: Workers Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution, 1936–1939* (New York: Free Life Editions, 1974), Chapter 7 offers a variety of accounts of collectivization during the initial days of the Revolution, all written by anarchist participants and observers.
[551] George Orwell, *Homage to Catalonia* (Boston: Beacon Press, 1952), 4–5. In these opening pages, Orwell sets up the mood at the tail end of the revolution, having arrived in Spain at the end of 1936, after the initial euphoria wore off. Of course, caveats must be made as to Orwell’s understanding of the political situation. Paul Preston offers a fairly in-depth corrective on this: Paul Preston, “Light and Shadow in George Orwell’s *Homage to Catalonia*”, *Bulletin of Spanish Studies* (2017): 1–29.
[552] Gao Fang, “Ye tan Xibanya zhanzheng zhong de Zhongguo yongshi” 《也谈西班牙战争中的中国勇士》[On Chinese Soldiers in Spain’s War], in Gao Fang, ed., *Guoji gongchanzhuyi yundong bieshi* 《国际共产主义运动别史》[An Alternative History of the International Communist Movement] (Beijing: Zhongguo shuji chubanshe, 2001), 362–363.
[553] See Stephen R. MacKinnon, *Wuhan, 1938: War, Refugees, and the Making of Modern China* (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 99–104 for a description of foreign correspondents who came to China. Nancy and Len Tsou, “Asian Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War: A Report,” *Science and Society* 68, no. 3 (2004): 348 offers a brief synopsis of Asian volunteers in Spain who later made their way to China. Of course, the most prominent example of volunteers in Spain making their way to China is Norman Bethune, eulogized by Mao, and memorialized in Shijiazhuang. British attitudes to the two conflicts are examined in Tom Buchanan, “‘Shanghai-Madrid Axis’? Comparing British Responses to the Conflicts in Spain and China, 1936–1939”, *Contemporary European History* 21, no. 4 (2012): 533–552, and “‘The Dark Millions in the Colonies are Unavenged’: AntiFascism and Anti-Imperialism in the 1930s,” *Contemporary European History* 25, no. 4 (2016): 645–665.
[554] Gao Fang, 367–369.
[555] A quick and crude keyword search on the CNBSKY database shows the term *Xibanya neizhan* 西班牙内战 appears in 917 titles for the period 1930–1939. 761 of these articles appeared in 1936–37, with a big drop off in 1938. Similar patters hold for *Xibanya neiluan* 西班牙内乱, with the term appearing in the titles of 252 articles during the 1930s. In this case, 233 articles contained the term in their titles in 1936 and 1937. Interestingly, the term *Xibanya geming* 西班牙革命 appears in the titles of 398 articles in the 1930s. The distribution is more evenly scattered throughout the decade with peaks in 1931 (67 articles), 1934 (85 articles), and 1936 (94 articles). These years corresponded to the founding of the Second Spanish Republic, the Revolutionary General Strike and its violent suppression, and the outbreak of the Civil War. This is just a crude search with no filters for language of publication, place of publication, format of publication, and so on. As with all databases, the CNBSKY does not contain all possible materials. Such a search would need to be carried out and cross-referenced across multiple holdings for these numbers to have greater statistical significance.
[556] Mao’s open letter to Spain appeared in *Jiefang*, vol. 1, no. 4, 24 May 1937. It was picked up in the Englishlanguage press and appeared the following month in *International Press Correspondence*, vol. 17, no. 26, 19 June 1937 under the title “The People of China Express Solidarity with Spain”. The *International Press Correspondence* was the international press service of the Comintern. See an overview at Marxists.org: [[https://www.marxists.org/][www.marxists.org]] history/international/comintern/inprecor/index.htm. Gregor Benton highlights that this support by the CCP was very much symbolic and rhetorical, looking to Spain as an inspiration in resistance, not a matter of offering resources or following tactics. See Benton, “The Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939”, in *Chinese Migrants and Internationalism*, 6768.
[557] Reportage even included comics, such as those printed in *Manhua* 《漫画》, and articles in publications like *Dazhong* 《大众》 (The Masses), *Qiyue* 《七月》 (July), *Xin zhonghua bao*《新中华报》(New China Journal), *Gongcheng banyue kan* 《工程半月刊》 (Engineering Bi-Monthly), *Qingnian wenhua* 《青年文化》 (Youth Culture), *Xin renshi* 《新认识》 (New Understanding], *Xin shijie* 《现世界》 (New World], and others. From the spread of publications and types of textual and visual reportage available, it would be fair to assume a fairly widespread awareness of Span’s plight, at least among educated urbanites. McKinnon’s work has shown how Western observers took an increased interest in China’s struggles in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, yet more needs to be done in looking at how Chinese viewed themselves in
[558] An example of this can be seen in a pictorial spread in *Xin zhanxian* 《新战线》 (New Front], no. 28, 1938 of publications from Spain touching on China’s fight against Japan. Also, there were articles like “Soviets Make Appeal for China, Spain” in the English-language *The China Press* that gave foreign and cosmopolitan Chinese audiences a sense of the international connections. There were also pieces like “Zhongguo fei Xibanya” in *Xinwen bao* 《新闻报》, that argued against any international connections between fighting in Spain and China.
[559] In “Da Xu Maoyong bing tan Xibanya de lianhe zhanxian”, *Zuojia*, vol. 1, no. 6, 1936, Ba Jin states, “As for Chinese anarchists, naturally, there are quite a few. But Xu Maoyong does not know them…In fact, the reason why Xu Maoyong cannot find any ‘anarchist treachery’ is that not one of those individuals mix in literary circles. They only exist in small corners of the earth, heads bowed, tilling the ground, working. They do not write essays, they do not debate in journals. Their words and deeds do not appear in the papers. Though their influence is small, they ardently hold to their hope, steel their faith, and give themselves to their work.”
[560] Yamaguchi Mamoru, in “Ba Jin yu Xibanya neizhan” 《巴金与西班牙内战》 [Ba Jin and the Spanish Civil War], writes, “Ba Jin utilized anarchist concepts to view the Spanish Civil War and the Anti-Japanese War as a single revolution. His work in translating and introducing the masses’ struggle in Spain was to demonstrate the existence of the masses’ struggle in China…”.
[561] Ibid., also see Higuchi Susumu, “Ba Jin yu Xibanya neizhan (shang)” 《巴金与西班牙内战（上）》[Ba Jin and the Spanish Civil War (Part 1)], in Kondo Mitsuo, trans., *Ba Jin yu Annaqi zhuyi* 《巴金与安那期主义》, 187–188. From the same anthology, also see Higuchi Susumu, “Ba Jin Lun” 《巴金论》 [On Ba Jin], 181. Both essays originally appeared in the late 60s and early 70s. Higuchi was a prominent Japanese Ba Jinologist in the 1960s and 70s.
[562] Some examples of relevant translations from Ba Jin include, Sim, *Xibanya de liming*, collection of engravings with captions. Pingming shudian, “Xin yishu congkan”, vol. 2, July 1938. Reprinted July 1939; Castelao, *Xibanya de xue*. Pingming shudian, April 1938. (Reprint: July 1938). Reprinted under this generic title, together with *Xibanya de kunnan*) by the same author, in October 1948.; Rudiger, H. “Yige Xibanya zhanshi di si.” *Fenghuo*, no. 13, 1 May 1938: 223–4 and no. 14, 10 May 1938: 253–6. Reprinted in 1938 as “Bu’ainawentula Duludi de shengping, in *The Fighter Durruti*; Minnig, Albert. “Yige guoji zhiyuanbing de riji”. *Fenghuo*, nos. 15–20 (21 May to 11 October 1938). Published in volume form in 1939; Rocker, Rudolf, *Xibanya de douzheng*. Meiguo Jiujinshan chubanshe, “Xibanya wenti yanjiu xiaocongshu”, vol. 1, October 1938. Reprint: Pingming shudian, “Xibanya wenti xiao congshu”, vol. 2, no. 1, April 1939; and others. These citations have all been taken from Angel Pino, “Ba Jin as Translator” in *Modern Chinese Literature and the West*.
[563] Jiang, *WSZX*, 1011. The influence of Kropotkin in China is something that deserves further attention in Western scholarship. See Chen and Li, *Wuzhengfuzhuyi pipan—Kelupaotejin zai Zhongguo*.
[564] Yeh Wen-hsin, “Middle Country Radicalism,” and Paul G. Pickowicz, “Memories of Revolution and Collectivization in China: The Unauthorized Reminiscences of a Rural Intellectual,” both provide glimpses of how radical ideologies and writings spread from the major urban centers on the coast into more peripheral regions.
[565] Qi Ya’nan and Luo Yihe, “Lu Jianbo: Ba Jin yan zhong de Zhongguo ‘Gandi’”.
[566] See the introduction for a fuller explanation of the mechanics of *Xuehui*’s notice board and an overview of the particular types of matters that were posted.
[567] The messaging board could also be used to arrange meeting and announce important figures who were visiting particular locations. An interesting example is the use of *Xuehui*’s messaging board to announce the address of Zhou Zuoren, with whom the blind Esperantist poet-activist Eroshenko was staying while living in Beijing. See “Xiao tongxin” 《小通信》[Notices], *Xuehui*, no. 81, 8 January 1923.
[568] Lu’s first appearance in the *Xiao tongxin* section of *Xuehui* was the April 4th edition in 1923, in which he informed colleagues that his contact address was still No. 1 Middle School in Nanjing. His last submission to *Xiao tongxin* seems to have been on January 30, 1924, in which he informed comrades he still had copies of his journal, *Heilan*, left and available. Overall, he does not seem to be very active in 1924 or 1925. This would have corresponded to the time in which he had to leave Nanjing after running afoul of the authorities there and take shelter in Beijing. This though is just through a quick scan of CNBKSY for articles under his pen name Jianbo.
[569] Jiang, *WSZX*, 1012–1013
[570] Ibid.
[571] Ibid.
[572] *Heilan* ran for only one issue before Lu was chased out of Nanjing, but in that initial issue, Lu issued a strident critique of what the Soviet Union termed the proletarian dictatorship. *Minfeng*, especially after it was reformed in Shanghai, provided much more space and Lu and his group commonly included items like manifestos from the Anarchist Youth International in Amsterdam, international news from Cuba, Japan, France, Bulgaria, Portugal, and other countries. See Els van Daele, *‘De Moker Group’: The Rebellious Youth in the Dutch Libertarian Movement in the Roaring Twenties* (Utrecht: Roofdruk Edities, 2013) for a brief overview of Dutch anarchist youth.
[573] Jing Meijiu (1882–1960), was an influential radical and anarchist figure in the Republican period. Jing went to study in Japan in 1902 and joined the *Tongmenghui* soon after it formed in 1905 and maintained his affiliation once Sun reformed it into the GMD. He was an active participant and agent for Sun, but that did not prevent him from holding and acting on anarchist proclivities, including publishing numerous anarchist periodicals. In the late 20s, Jing was one among many veteran anarchists who advocated for anarchist collaboration with the GMD.
[574] Jiang, *WSZX*, 1015–1021
[575] Ibid.
[576] A well-written English-language biography is Nick Heath, “Lu Jianbo 卢剑波 (1904–1991)”, *Libcom.org*, 24 January 2014, [[https://libcom.org/history/lu-jianbo-%E5%8D%A2%E5%89%A3%E6%B3%A2-1904-1991][libcom.org]].
[577] Jesse Cohn, “Traces of *Revista Única*: Appearances and Disappearances of Anarchism in Steubenville, 19091973”, *Writing Revolution*, 163; and Jorell Melendez Badillo, “The Anarchist Imaginary: Max Nettlau and Latin America, 1890–1934”, *Writing Revolution*, 182.
[578] Lu’s responses to the initial survey appeared in the 19 July 1927 edition of *La Protesta*, a weekly anarchist journal founded in 1903. Personal communication with Jesse Cohn, 18 January 2020.
[579] Heath, “Lu Jianbo”, *Libcom.org*.
[580] Lu’s Esperanto connections were maintained after the Second World War and he evidently contributed to *Senstatano*, an Esperanto published by the Internacional Juvenil Anarquista, an international anarchist youth organization run by Germinal Gracia and Eduardo Vivancos. Gracia and Vivancos were members of the Spanish CNT-in-Exile, and both had participated in the Civil War with anarchist youth groups. Gracia’s connections to Chinese and Japanese anarchists were apparently deep enough that he was able to publish short studies of anarchists in both countries. He knew Yamaga Taiji and MPT Acharya and was in contact with Lu Jianbo. Advertisements for his writings appeared in the Mexico City-published organ of the CNT-in-Exile, *Tierra y Libertad*. They were published under one of his pseudonyms, Victor García. See Danny Evans for an examination of the international world of exiled Spanish anarchists: Danny Evans, “Uprooted Cosmopolitans? The Post-War Exile of Spanish Anarchists in Venezuela, 1945–1965”, *Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies* 25, no. 2 (2019): 321–342. García is discussed
[581] Jiang Jun, “Lu Jianbo xiansheng zaonian de wuzhengfuzhuyi xuanchuan huodong jishi” [An Account of Mr. Lu Jianbo’s Early Anarchist Propaganda Activities], in *Wuzhengfuzhuyi sixiang ziliao xuan* [A Selection of Materials on Anarchist Thought] (*WSZX*), eds., Ge Mouchun, Jiang Jun, and Li Xingyi (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1984), 1019–1020.
[582] Li Xingzhi, “Cong *Jingzhe* yuekan de chuban kan Zhongguo jindai wuzhengfuzhuyi sichao de zhongjie” 《从《惊蛰》月刊的出版看中国近代无政府主义思潮的终结》 [Examining the End of Modern China’s Anarchist Thought Wave from the Publication of *Jingzhe*], *Shandong daxue wenke lunwen jikan*, no. 2 (1985): 62–70. represents this perspective quite well. Most existing scholarship on anarchism in the PRC takes the teleological approach to anarchism’s existence in China. It set the stage, but it was replaced by a more empirically grounded and revolutionarily correct Marxism. In this reading, anarchism and anarchists’ fates are sealed by the preordained arrival of the CCP and its Marxist-Leninist-Maoist line. However, as this chapter argues, such teleologies place anarchism and its failures in a larger historical narrative that anarchists themselves did not see for their activities. Lu and the others could acknowledge *Jingzhe*’s shortcomings but still remain committed to anarchism and still view their activities as worthwhile.
[583] Lu Jianbo, for example, wrote to Emma Goldman in France and collaborated with Ray Jones, an immigrant Chinese anarchist living in San Francisco. After the GMD White Terror in 1927, Jacques Reclus, a French anarchist who taught at Labor University helped Lu to safety after it became apparent GMD forces were targeting him. In late 1926, anarchists in China even floated the idea of forming an East Asian Anarchist League. The proposed organization would join together anarchists from China, Korea, Japan and other Asian countries with the aim of fighting colonialism and nationalism. See Liu Xu, “Zhuzhang zuzhi dongya wuzhengfuzhuyizhe dalianmeng”, [On Organizing an East Asian Anarchist League], *WSZX*, 716–719.
[584] Turcato, “Italian Anarchism as a Transnational Movement, 410–411.
[585] For the scans I have, no issue from volume 4 has a censor stamp. For issues from volume 3, the censor message is “本刊已领得内政部证警字 6174 号” with some slight variations in phrasing. Issues 1, 2, and 5 do not have the censor stamp. For volumes 1 and 2, the message was “本刊已领得内政部警字第 6174 号登记证”. Sometimes the censor number is 674, and for many issues, bank notation is used for the censor number. The censor stamp for the first issue of the journal reads as follows: “本刊呈请省政府省党部转请内政部中宣会登记” . Further research needs to be done, but it is interesting that *Jingzhe* got past the censors. It is also important to note that, unlike broader anarchist narratives, the journal did not comment on its own possible repression or marginalization. What were the precedents? Was the journal considered to be a ‘youth journal’ like the editors contend in one of their afterwords? A comparable example could be *Chongjing*, which announced to readers that they were an approved journal. Was it an issue of connections or overworked censors, and how does it matter to anarchists who were nominally repressed by the GMD? These are all questions that need to be asked of how and why *Jingzhe* continued to be published. See Stephen R. MacKinnon, “Toward a History of the Chinese Press in the Republican Period,” *Modern China* 23, no. 1 (1997): 15–17 for some initial musings as how publications adhered to or contravened government control.
[586] Examples of translated texts include Malatesta’s “Anarchist Principles”, “Problems of Revolution”, “Anarchism and Amorality”; Kropotkin’s “How to Advance the Revolution”’ Goldman’s “Social Significance of Modern Drama”, The Influence of Darkness on Tolstoy”; Carpenter’s “Anarchist Society”; and others. This is just a sampling of translated texts and does not include quotations and reference from polemical articles.
[587] Original fiction and poetry primarily appeared in the first volume of the journal. With the beginning of the second volume, the literature section virtually disappeared.
[588] Further exploration into how and where Chinese anarchist publications fit into the broader print culture of the Republican era are incredibly important. Important too is a broader historiography and appreciation of anarchist print culture. If we are to better understand and appreciate the transnational ventures of Chinese anarchists, it stands to reckon we must further probe the nexus of various global anarchist print cultures. For some recent examples of attempts to explore anarchist print cultures, see Jesse Cohn, *Underground Passages: Anarchist Resistance Culture, 1848–2011* (Oakland and Edinburgh: AK Press, 2014); James Michael Yeoman, *Print Culture and the Formation of the Anarchism Movement in Spain, 1890–1915* (New York and London: Routledge, 2020); and Montse Feu, *Fighting Fascist Spain: Worker Protest from the Printing Press* (Urbana and Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 2020).
[589] Though examining the composition of *Jingzhe* is a matter of physical properties, the only way I have been able to look at the complete run of the journal has been through digital scans. This presents a bigger issue of what is lost when I rely on digital reproductions and not the originals in the archives. It has made collecting materials much easier, but there is a lot that is lost in terms of a benign myopia of relying on those publications that have been digitized and ignoring those that have not. See Kenyon Zimmer, “Archiving the American Anarchist Press: Reflections on Format, Accessibility, and Language”, *American Periodicals: A Journal of History and Criticism*, vol. 29, no. 1 (2019): 9–11, and Laura Putnam, “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows they Cast”, *American Historical Review*, vol. 121, no. 2 (2016): 377–402. Also see Montse Feu, “Recovering Spanish-Language Anarchist Periodicals: Thoughts on Silences, Identities, Access, and Affective Engagement,” *American Periodicals: A Journal of History and Criticism* 29, no. 1 (2019): 14–15. Feu’s point on affective connections through the physicality of research materials is well-taken. In research for this project, it is quite evident the difference in feel and tone between chapters in which the majority of used materials is physical and those in which the majority of used sources is digital.
[590] Again, this analysis is not based on physical copies, but on digital scans. But I can tell by the increased blotchiness of the print, the lack of artwork, and the overall compression of the type and decrease in font size there was a clear downgrade in print and paper quality. Most demonstrable is that both volumes 1 and 2 had cover pages with artwork. Further, the page set up was so that there was one block of text for the entirety of the page, from top to bottom. From volume 3, the periodical switched to something more akin to a newspaper layout, with there being a top half of print and a bottom half of print. As such, the font size decreased dramatically so that more text could fit on the page. The journal title was reduced to a simple masthead in the upper right quadrant of the first page.
[591] “Bianhou”, 《编后》 [Editorial Afterword], *Jingzhe*, vol. 3, no. 1, 1 September 1938. Yeh, Wen-hsin, “Writing in Wartime China: Chongqing, Shanghai, and Southern Zhejiang”, *Journal of Modern Chinese History* 13, no. 1 (2014), particularly pp. 27–29 offers a great description of paper and print shortages faced by publishers in wartime Chongqing.
[592] The issue with the least number of articles was volume 3, number 5 from January 1939 with 3 articles. Numbers 2, 3, and 4 from volume 3 all had six articles. All three issues from volume 4 had five articles.
[593] Serialization due to lack of space and apologetic editorial prefaces and afterwords do seem to be standard practice over a wide range of journals. What is especially interesting in this case is that the *Jingzhe* editors did not compromise on font size or composition until the start of volume 3 in md-1938. While this may be insignificant, it is something to ponder as it feels as though Lu Jianbo and company were not feeling especially pressed to squeeze every last bit of efficiency out of the paper that they could.
[594] The editorial afterword for volume 3, issue 1, cites the switch to cheaper paper stock as a reason why the *Jingzhe* will not need to have advertising. But really, there was essentially no advertisements outside of volume 1 apart from blurbs for new books or series. The ad that appears in volume 3, issue 3 is for Ba Jin’s translation of Kropotkin’s “Appeal to the Young” and something titled “Wanren de anle” 《万人的安乐》. An essay by Lu Jianbo is also advertised. Both were available at the Chengdu Kaiming Bookstore 开明书店 and at Chongqing’s Jinri Publishing 今日出版社.
[595] These advertisements appeared in every issue of volume 2, except issues 1 and 6, which were the first and last of the volume. Issue 6 had advertisements for translations from Spain and another set of translations of anarchist thinkers.
[596] Essentially, on the cover page of each issue, the date would appear in Chinese either above or to the side of the featured artwork, and the date in Esperanto would appear below the artwork.
[597] This is not to say that Esperanto was the only roman script that appeared in the journal. Terms and concepts that were difficult to translate or transliterate into Chinese were rendered into roman script, most likely into the script of the original text. Further tracing is needed, but these bracketed terms in Esperanto and other European languages can possibly tell us the original languages of the texts used.
[598] This is important because the tea shop and news service locations were apparently popular places for editing groups for periodicals to work. Personal correspondence with Wang Di, 27 May 2017. The contact person listed for West China Union Advanced Middle School was not Lu Jianbo, but his close collaborator, Wu Xianyou.
[599] Speculation is all we have now, but the contact address for efforts to open a Chengdu-branch of the Solidaridad Internacional Antifascista was Wu Xianyou’s at West China Union. Tian Shen, “Guoji kang faxisi huzhu hui” 《国际抗法西斯互助会》 [International Antifascist Solidarity], *Jingzhe* vol. 2, no. 5 (938: 20–23. Tian Shen seems to be an abbreviation of Lu Jianbo’s pen name, Tian Shenyu.
[600] Volume 2 averaged just over 8 articles per issue. This compared to Volumes 3 and 4, which averaged about 5 articles per issue. In terms of article length, character counts could be made, but there would likely be no significant difference. The change in format from volume 3 on allowed for the *Jingzhe* editors to maximize space.
[601] The main author for these articles were Shi Ya 施雅, and they appeared from the very beginning. Shi Ya most likely would have been the pen name for Lu Jianbo’s wife, Deng Tianyu. Deng and Lu met in Shanghai in the mid20s and married soon after. Together, they authored a number of articles related to anarchism and women’s issues. See Lu’s obituary and the Libcom.org bio for additional info.
[602] This is not to say that it was only via the CNT-FAI Bulletins that they could have known of these addresses. One thing this dissertation hopes to make clear is that Chinese anarchists were quite well connected to the world around them and with their global peers across Asia, Europe, and the Americas.
[603] Lu Jianbo to FAI Esperanto Section, 13 January 1937, IISH ARCH00393, PE-64A.2.
[604] See Heath, “Lu Jianbo”, *Libcom.org*.
[605] Bao Pu’s letters in the 1920s to *Freedom* and the *Minzhong* group’s efforts to help raise donations for *Freedom*’s 40th anniversary in 1926 are examples of these connections. See Chapter 2 for more in depth discussions
[606] See Chapters 2 and 6 for further details
[607] See Chuang’s letters to Gudell and to the CNT-FAI Foreign Office. Chang Yen to Martin Gudell 28 February 1935 and 22 July 1935, IISH ARCH00529.15
[608] This is very circumstantial. Yamaga Taiji was in contact with the CNT-FAI foreign correspondence office, but his initial letter appears in 1938, well into the initial run for *Jingzhe*. Still, correspondence from Japanese anarchists appeared in *Jingzhe’s* pages around the same time, see “Dongjing lai de tongqing yousheng,” *Jingzhe*, vol. 2, no. 1, 10 November 1937.
[609] Over the course of *Jingzhe*’s run, Tian Shenyu was used as a pen name in 11 translations. The translations were a mix of reportage from CNT-FAI journals and essays by Emma Goldman.
[610] Not much is recorded about the contributors to *Jingzhe*, so it is hard to speculate who the two names belonged. Lu Jianbo is a good candidate, but so is his brother, as well as other contributors.
[611] Heath, “Lu Jianbo”, *Libcom.org*.
[612] Ba Jin to CRIA, 18 March 1949. See English translation at the Kate Sharpley Library: [[https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/15dvhn][www.katesharpleylibrary.net]].
[613] Wu Yun, “Women dang kangzhan” 《我们当抗战》 [We Are in a Resistance War], *Jingzhe*, 20 October 1937, 1.
[614] Ibid.
[615] Ibid., 3.
[616] Ibid.
[617] Lu’s calling the conflict in Spain a ‘revolution’ and not a ‘civil war’ is an important distinction. For anarchists, what was happening in Spain was a social revolution and their fight against the Franco and the Nationalists was in defense of the social revolution they had begun. It was not a conflict between two competing political aspirants for control of the state. See Kenyon Zimmer, “The Other Volunteers: American Anarchists and the Spanish Civil War”, *Journal for the Study of Radicalism* 10, no. 2 (2016): 21–25 for a detailed breakdown of how the Civil War has been traditionally viewed in mainstream historiography and how it was seen by anarchists of the time.
[618] The vampire-imagery came from Yaren, “Fan Qinlvezhe de kangzhan” 《反侵略者的抗战》[Resistance War against Aggressors] and Jingjing, “Cong Lugoqiao yu Shanghai kangzhan delai de jiaoxun” 《从卢沟桥与上海抗战得来的教训》[Lessons from Resistance at Lugou Bridge and Shanghai], both from *Jingzhe*, vol. 1,no. 6, 1937.
[619] Feng Man, “Qingnian de xiuyang” 《青年的修养》 [The Training of Youth], *Jingzhe*, vol. 1, no. 6, 1937.
[620] Ibid.
[621] Yin Lizhi, “Yi zhanzheng qu fandui zhanzheng” 《以战争去反对战争》 [Opposing War Through War], *Jingzhe*, vol. 2, no. 1, 10 November 1937.
[622] Gong Ke, “Quanmian kangzhan de zhu yaodian 《全面抗战的诸要点》 [Key Aspects of a Total Resistance War], *Jingzhe*, vol. 2, no. 1, 10 November 1937.
[623] “Bianhou” 《编后》 [Editorial Afterword], *Jingzhe*, vol. 2, no. 6, 1938.
[624] “Bianhou”, *Jingzhe*, vol. 2, no. 6, 1938.
[625] The articles appear in issues 2, 3, and 4 of volume 2.
[626] Da Ji, “Gongzuo de taidu” 《工作的态度》 [Our Bearing on Work], *Jingzhe*, vol. 3, no.1, 1938.
[627] Wu Yun, “Jige jiben de renshi” 《几个基本的认识》 [Some Basic Understandings], *Jingzhe*, vol. 3, no. 1, 1938.
[628] Li Min, “Wuzhengfuzhuyi yu Zhongguo kangzhan” [Anarchism and China’s War of Resistance], Ge, et al., eds., *WSZX*, 889–896. This article originally appeared in Jingzhe, vol. 3, No. 5 (1938). Li Min could possibly be one of Lu Jianbo’s pen names. In the journal, he used at least three: Wu Yun, Tian Shenyu, and Da Ji. See previous section for further discussion. Until this issue is solved, I will treat Lu Jianbo and Li Min as separate individuals.
[629] Ibid., 890.
[630] Ibid., 891.
[631] Ibid., 896.
[632] Wu Yun, “Kangzhan zhu fangmian” 《抗战诸方面》 [Aspects of the Resistance War], in Ge, et al., eds., *WSZX,* 883. This article originally appeared in *Jingzhe*, vol. 2, no. 4, 1938.
[633] Li Min, “Wuzhengfuzhuyi,” 891.
[634] Ibid., 891.
[635] Errico Malatesta, “Anarchists Have Forgotten Their Principles,” *The Anarchist Library*, accessed 10 August 2016, [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/errico-malatesta-anarchists-the-war-and-their-principles][theanarchistlibrary.org]]
[636] Yin Lizhi, “Yi zhanzhang qu fandui zhanzheng”, *WSZX*, 878. This article originally appeared in *Jingzhe*, vol. 2, no. 1, 1937.
[637] The Ten Guiding Principles came from the 22–25 August 1937 Luochuan Conference. It would serve as a blueprint for how the CCP believed total war of resistance against the Japanese should be fought. It advocated the total mobilization of China’s military resources and its populace for the war effort. In addition, it also called for political reform, directing economic production to produce materiel for the war, eliminating traitors, implementing anti-Japanese propaganda in school curricula, and improving the daily lives of the people. For a summary of the Luochuan conference in English, see “Resolution of the CC on the Current Situation and the Party’s Tasks (25 August 1937)”, in *The Rise to Power of the Chinese Communist Party: Documents and Analysis*, eds. Tony Saich and Benjamin Yang (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2015), 791–792.
[638] The articles cited were Fan Changjiang, “Gankai guo Jin Ling” 《感慨过金陵》 [Jin Ling’s Exasperation]; “Ganjin xishua women bu heli de zhengzhi” 《赶紧洗刷我们不合理的政治》 [Let Us Quickly Get Rid of Our Irrational Politics]; Lu Fen, “Danyuan ru bi” 《但愿如彼》 [Were It to Be Like That]; and Zhang Jingfu, “Zhandi suo jian de yanzhong wenti” 《战地所见的严重问题》 [The Most Pressing Problems Seen on the Battlefield]. See Lu, in Ge, et al., eds., *WSZX*, 879–880.
[639] Wu, “Kangzhan,” 880.
[640] Ibid., 883.
[641] Li Min, “Wuzhengfuzhuyi,” 896.
[642] In his short biography of Lu Jianbo, Jiang Jun, a historian writing in the 1980s, visibly passed judgment on the lack of practical results of Lu anarchist agitations. However, that ignores understanding the efforts of Lu and company on their own terms and instead following the teleology that resulted in the triumph of the CCP.
[643] See Arif Dirlik, *Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution*, Ch. 7, “The Revolution That Never Was: Anarchism in the GMD” for a detailed overview of this.
[644] Again, this is not to say that there were no attempts by anarchists to organize any political or social movements. The anarchist led Laodong daxue (Labor University) in Shanghai and Liming gaozhong (Liming Advanced Middle School) in Quanzhou, Fujian were both attempts to provide anarchist education. Moreover, anarchists at Liming Advanced Middle School attempted to organize inhabitants in the surrounding countryside. For further information on Liming Advanced Middle School and its efforts, refer to the previous chapter and also “Fangwen Fan Tianjun xiansheng de jilu,” *WSZX*, 1044–1047.
[645] These ideas were further developed in “Zhongguo kangzhan zhihou” 《中国抗战之后》and “Zhongguo kangzhan de yiyi” 《中国抗战的意义》.
[646] Li Min, *WSXZ*, 889.
[647] Wu Yun, “Kang faxisizhuyi zhi dong xi zhan” 《抗法西斯主义之东西战》 [Anti-Fascist Wars of Resistance, East and West], *Jingzhe* Vol. 2, No. 5, 1938， 8.
[648] Tian Shen, “Guoji kang faxisi huzhu hui” 《国际抗法西斯互助会》 [International Antifascist Solidarity], *Jingzhe* vol. 2, no. 5, 1938, 20–23.
[649] Zarrow and Dirlik certainly note the impact of Kropotkin on Chinese anarchism in their work. More recently, Justin Ritzinger has explored the impact of Kropotkin on Buddhist modernization efforts led by Taixu. Gotelind Müller-Saini has also written on Kropotkin’s place, as mediated through Japanese translation, in the transnational reception of anarchism in China. In China, a 2009 collection of Chinese writings on Kropotkin brought together a wide variety of historical voices that demonstrated the wide range of responses to Kropotkin’s thought. Fittingly enough, the compilers chose to use a foreword penned by Ba Jin in 1933 originally published in volume one of his *Kelupaotejin Quanji*. The title of Ba Jin’s preface became the title of the recent collection. See Li Guangcun, ed., *Wuzhengfuzhuyi pipan—Kelupaotejin zai Zhongguo* 《无政府主义批判——克鲁泡特金在中国》 [A Critique of Anarchism – Kropotkin in China] (Nanchang: Jiangxi gaoxiao chubanshe, 2009). For Ritzinger’s work, see “Dependent Co-Evolution: Kropotkin’s Theory of Mutual Aid and Its Appropriation by Chinese Buddhists,” *Chung-Hwa Buddhist Journal* 26 (2013): 89–112; and “The Awakening of Faith in Anarchism: A Forgotten Chapter in the Chinese Buddhist Encounter with Modernity,” *Politics, Religion, and Ideology* 15, no. 2 (2014): 224–243. For Müller-Saini, see *China, Kropotkin und der Anarchimus: Eine Kulturbewegung im China des frühen 20. Jarhunderts unter dem Einfluss des Westens und japanischer Vorbilder* (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2001).
[650] These are the methodological concerns highlighted by Davide Turcato in “Italian Anarchism as a Transnational Movement”, Constance Bantman and Bert Altena in *Reassessing the Transnational Turn*, Jorell Meléndez Badillo and Nathan Jun in *Without Borders or Limits*, as well as a variety of recent scholars working in anarchist studies.
[651] Lu formed a later journal called *Pohuai* 《破坏》 and was involved with *Shi yu chao* 《时与潮》, among others. In his post-war correspondence, he mentions others, but further rooting out is needed. For now, we will limit ourselves to his efforts to rebuild networks in the immediate Post-War period.
[652] Libcom.org has a brief sketch of anarchist activity in the Resistance during WWII. See “1939–1945: Anarchist Activity in France during World War II,” *Libcom.org*, [[https://libcom.org/library/anarchist-activity-france-world-war2][libcom.org]], accessed 15 November 2019.
[653] Andrew Cornell, “A New Anarchism Emerges: 1940–1954,” *Libcom.org*, 29 May 2015 [[https://libcom.org/history/new-anarchism-emerges-1940%E2%80%931954][libcom.org]]. For a fuller account, see Andrew Cornell, *Unruly Equality*.
[654] That is not to say there were no influential anarchist journals published in the United States during the war. There was the pacifist-leaning *Retort* (1942–1951) in Bearsville, NY, and the NYC-based *Why?* (1942–1947), which was a continuation of the *Vanguard* group by younger members. After the war, *Why?* would re-launch as *Resistance* (1947–1954). It was in this journal that Ba Jin published a letter he had received from Bartolomeo Vanzetti in 1927. See *Resistance*, vol 7, no. 2 (July/August 1948).
[655] From 1939 to 1945, UK-based *Freedom* published in as *War Commentary*, printing news and editorials on domestic issues, the war and reconstruction efforts from an anarchist perspective
[656] West China Union Advanced Middle School, originally founded in 1908, was affiliated with the Western missionary established West China Union University 华西协和大学. Both schools are still active today, with the advanced middle school now known as Chengdu Huaxi High School 成都华西中学. West China Union University’s story is a bit more complex, with its various colleges being broken off into separate institutions, some of which later merged into Sichuan University 四川大学, which was known as National Sichuan University then.
[657] See Olga Lang, *Pa Chin and His Writings: Chinese Youth between the Wars* (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), Chapter 9 for an overview of Ba Jin’s writings during the war and how the violence affected the content of his literary output.
[658] Lu’s efforts will be discussed later, but for see Chapter 2 for a brief recap. Another critical aspect is the importance of texts and writings in re-establishing anarchism and anarchist movements in China. As argued by Iain McKay and others, anarchism is a textual and propaganda-based movement and needs texts and writings to survive and flourish. In McKay’s arguments especially, anarchism has need for its sages so as to elevate and make manifest the real meaning behind the activities of working-class adherents. See McKay, “Sages and Movements”.
[659] Angel Pino, in “Ba Jin et ses correspondants anarchists de l’étranger: dernières traces (1948–1950)” provides a great initial overview of anarchists whom Ba Jin contacted in the immediate years after the war. This chapter attempts to build off Pino’s efforts and tease out the larger connections and embedded networks teased at in these correspondences.
[660] Here, I am taking inspiration from Leela Gandhi’s writings on affective communities and bonds of friendship among radical communities. See Leela Gandhi, *Affective Communities*, 17–32. Much thanks to a certain irascible French-Canadian for introducing this to me. In both Darren Kuang and Liu Chuang’s cases (especially in Liu Chuang’s case), what we see is anarchism serving as a pathway for friendship and companionship. From the archives available, we do not have much evidence of their political activities, but we do have examples of the communities they formed, the loyalties they felt, and how they took care of one another. Certainly, we can argue that there is not much to this, especially in terms of how friendships and intellectual brotherhoods were expressed in Chinese contexts, but to do so would be overlooking something just because it is too obvious. In a 2015presentation at UBC on the relationship between Ba Jin and Agnes Inglis, it was pointed out that the relationship between the two was not anything extraordinary in terms of how members of the old Chinese literati communities interacted with one another, but to overlook these transnational affective bonds is to take the radical possibilities of what they did together all for granted.
[661] Anarchist Youth Federation of China, “Declaration of the Anarchist Youth Federation of China—August 1, 1927,” *La Revista Blanca*, vol. 6, no. 106, 15 October 1927, 319–320. This was a translation of the Chinese version of the manifesto, which appeared in the combined no. 4/no. 5 issue of *Minfeng* in September 1927. In that version, it is dated August 1 as well. Presumably, it was first published as a pamphlet.
[662] The *Minfeng* 民锋 group was headed by Lu Jianbo. It first formed in Nanjing around 1923, disbanded later that year after Lu Jianbo drew the ire of local governing elites, and reformed a few years later in Shanghai. Its journal was *Minfeng* 《民锋》.
[663] Wu Zhihui, Li Shizeng, and Jing Meijiu were all, of course prominent anarchists associated with the GMD. Wu and Li were among the first generation of Chinese anarchists. Jing Meijiu was an early member of the Revolutionary Alliance who came under anarchist influence while studying in Japan in the first decade of the 20th century. Shen Zhongjiu was a Zhejiang-born anarchist who had studied abroad in Japan and Germany. In 1927, Shen would write in favor of anarchist cooperation with the GMD. All four figures listed are older anarchists. Wu was born in 1865 and Li, Shen, and Jing were all born in the 1880s. Strictly speaking, even though they followed anarchism, their political upbringing was different to that of Lu Jianbo (born 1904) and his comrades. Interestingly, Wu, Li, Shen, and Jing are not mentioned in the Chinese version published in *Minfeng*. Nor is it in the Spanish translation that appeared later in *Avante* in Mexico.
[664] “Declaration of the Anarchist Youth Federation of China,” 320.
[665] “Dichiarazione degli Anarchici della Federazione Giovanile Cinese,” *L’Emancipazione*, no. 5, 11 November 1927, p. 1 (Also see Introduction and Chapter 3 for more information on this group). *Avante* ran from 1927–1930. It was published in 2 volumes, or *Epocas*—volume 1 (1927) and volume 2 (1928–1930). Its first volume was published in Monterrey and edited collectively by the *Avante* group. The second volume on was published in Tampico, a major industrial port on the Gulf of Mexico. The paper was closely associated with the *Hermanos Rojos*, an anarchist group formed in 1917. The *Hermanos Rojos* orchestrated a diverse array of anarchist influenced activities and publications. Its most well-known figure was Librado Rivera (1864–1932), an original member of the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM), a transnational political party that became Mexico’s first anarchist organization. Its main figures were Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magón, Rivera, Antonio Villareal, and Antonio Diaz Soto y Gama. See Albro Ward, *Always a Rebel: Ricardo Flores Magón and the Mexican Revolution* (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1992); Colin MacLachlan, *Anarchism and the Mexican Revolution: The Political Trials of Ricardo Flores Magón in the United States* (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); James Cockcroft, *Intellectual Precursors of the Mexican Revolution, 1900–1913* (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968); also see [[http://archivomagon.net/][archivomagon.net]] for Magón’s writings and [[http://www.libradorivera.com/][www.libradorivera.com]] for information specifically on Librado Rivera’s activities. There are widespread controversies surrounding Flores Magón, the Mexican anarchists, and their activities. Like their Chinese counterparts, their movements were overshadowed by more centralized and organized political parties and what little discussions of anarchism that take place in the historiography have reduced anarchism to its intellectual influence and background and how it served, or did not serve, as a forerunner for later socialist/nationalist ideologies. However, there has been a resurgence of interest in Flores Magón and the PLM anarchists, especially in how their transnational activities can be seen as a resource for multiple identities along the US borderlands. See Claudio Lomnitz, *The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón* (Cambridge: Zone Books, 2014); and James A. Sandos, *Rebellion in the Borderlands: Anarchism and the Plan of San Diego* (Noman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992); and Benjamin Herber Johnson, *Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans* (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003). Further, recent research has also drawn focus to how Mexico, especially in the 1920s and 30s, was a hotbed of transnational Latin American radicalism. See the work of Barry Carr in this regard: “Radicals, Revolutionaries, and Exiles: Mexico City in the 1920s,” *Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies* (Fall 2010): 26–30, accessed 15 June 2014; “Pioneering Transnational Solidarity in the Americas: The Movement in Support of Augusto C. Sandino,” *Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research Review* 20, no. 2 (2014): 141–152; and “‘Across Seas and Borders’: Charting the Webs of Radical Internationalism in the Circum-Caribbean,” in *Exile and the Politics of Exclusion in Latin America*, eds. Luis Roniger, James N. Green, and Pablo Yankelevich (Sussex: Sussex Academic Publishing 2012): 217–240.
[666] Here, what I am trying to argue is that even though you do not see a preponderance of presence in the global anarchist press, you have Chinese anarchists writing letters, subscribing to journals, and very aware of what was happening in international anarchist circles. They participated in a global community, plain and simple. This points to what needs to be and what can be done in tracing communications networks—sit down, trace subscriptions and circulation figures, and tackle anarchism in China through print culture and circulation of periodicals. It will not change the story of what happened or provide anarchists more importance or influence than they actually possessed, but it will offer a better picture of their overall prevalence and staying power in 1920s-40s Sinophone worlds.
[667] Turn to the last section of Chapter 2 for a recapitulation of these networks from Ba Jin’s perspectives.
[668] Refer back to Chapter 5 for further discussion of what journals Lu and the *Jingzhe* group mined for their translations on Spain and the Civil War.
[669] Lu Chien-bo, “Desde China: Saludos anarquistas,” *Tierra y Libertad*, no. 40, 25 February 1946, 4.
[670] Lu Chien-bo, “El Anarquismo en China,” *Tierra y Libertad*, no. 41, 10 March 1946, 3.
[671] Ibid.
[672] Lu Chien-bo, “Lettere dalla China,” *Le Reveil/Il Risveglio*, no. 131, February 1946, 10. *Le Reveil/Il Risveglio* was published and edited by Luigi Bertoni (1872–1947). Bertoni published the paper in a bilingual edition after the war. Before the war, there were separate French and Italian editions that sometimes differed in terms of content.
[673] See Nikolas Kanellos, “Spanish-Language Anarchist Periodicals in Early Twentieth-Century United States,” *Protest on the Page: Essays on Print and the Culture of Dissent since 1865*, eds James L. Baughman, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, and James P. Danky (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015), 59–84 for further information. Also see relevant sections in the previous chapter.
[674] Lu Chien-bo, “Comunicado desde China,” *Cultura Proletaria*, no. 946, 1946, 1.
[675] See Lu Chien-bo, “Lettere dalla China,” *L’Adunata dei Refrattari*, no. 17, 26 April 1947, 3 in which Lu requests the *Adunata* group send any material via Ray Jones in San Francisco.
[676] Here, Ray Jones’s letters to Lu Jianbo, content-wise, offer a welcome comparison to those sent from Ba Jin. Like Ba Jin, Lu Jianbo requested numerous anarchist materials, and the surviving letters he sent to Jones are full of references to the works of Berkman, Malatesta, Rocker, materials from the IWMA, and issues of *L’Adunata dei Refrattari*. Interestingly, Lu also used his connection with Jones to procure materials he used to develop lecture materials for his day job as a professor of Greco-Roman history at Sichuan University.
[677] Perhaps a representative effort of anarchists to re-network their worlds and movements would be the efforts of Boris Yelensky and the Free Society Group (FSG) in Chicago. During the late 1940s, Yelensky and the FSG solicited state-of-the-movement essays from anarchists all over the world. Ba Jin was one of those whose reportage was sought, though he was ultimately unable to follow through (see Chapter 2, n. 128). Anarchist figures from the UK, Spain, France, the US, India, and Japan all responded with essays, and in 1951, these were published in the anthology, *The World Scene from the Libertarian Point of View*. The Labadie Collection at U Michigan holds a copy of the pamphlet. An online PDF can also be found at [[https://libcom.org/library/world-scene-libertarian-point-view][libcom.org]].
[678] With some exceptions, most of the surviving correspondence we have between Ba Jin and other international anarchists seems to be from this period from 1948–1950. However, it is known that he corresponded with Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Rudolf Rocker, Bartolomeo Vanzetti, and others during the 1920s and 30s.
[679] Angel Pino, “Correspondants de l’étranger: dernières traces (1948–1950),” *A contratemps: Bulletin de critique bibliographique* 45, no. 3 (2013). [[http://acontretemps.org/spip.php?article454][acontretemps.org]]. Pino provides a through list of who Ba Jin corresponded with and comparing this with the Agnes Inglis’s correspondence list it appears that they shared numerous correspondents.
[680] See Appendix for table concerning works donated by Ba Jin and Ray Jones. So far, only a few of Ba Jin and Ray Jones’s donations have been confirmed as still being held by the library.
[681] In other words, no matter their political circumstances, these individuals made an active commitment to advance anarchist practices, whether it be through the telling and compiling of anarchist history or the rebuilding of local, regional, and international movements. That these efforts were often overshadowed does not mean they were insignificant, as the effort figures like Lu Jianbo, Ba Jin, Inglis, Jones, and others expended represented a considerable personal investment.
[682] Lang, 167–168.
[683] Angel Pino, “Ba Jin as Translator,” in *Modern China and the West: Translation and Cultural Mediation*, 28–105 has an extensive list of the works that Ba Jin has translated and has already done much to chart out Ba Jin’s correspondence with international anarchists.
[684] Ba Jin originally intended to publish Kropotkin’s *Complete Works* as a set of ten volumes, but it appears he only ever published Kropotkin’s *Mutual Aid, Words of a Rebel, The Conquest of Bread, Memoirs of a Revolutionist*, and *Ethics*. See “Sishi niandai yi chuban he ni chuban de hanyi Keshi shumu guanggao” 《四十年代已出版和拟出版的汉译 克氏书目广告》 [An Advertisement Listing Already Published and to be Published Translations of Kropotkin’s Writings in the 1940s], in WPKZZ, 52.
[685] See Ba Jin, 1949, 18 March 1949, “Letter from Ba Jin to CRIA,” *The Kate Sharpley Library,* [[http://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/15dvhn][www.katesharpleylibrary.net]]. The original French version of the letter can be found in Ba Jin, *Yijian xinbian* 《佚简新编》, ed. Li Cunguang (Zhengzhou, Henan: Daxiang chubanshe, 2003), 46–47.
[686] See Pino’s description in “Ba Jin as Translator” and “Correspondents de L’Entranger: Dernières Traces (19481950)”.
[687] Darren Kuang to Inglis, 22 October 1948, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 4.
[688] See Inglis to Li Pei-kan 21 November 1948; Ba Jin notes he received the issue in 6 February 1949. Ba Jin never wrote Inglis to ask for a copy of *Probuzhdenie*; he actually asked through a mutual acquaintance, a Ms. Darren Kuang Chen. See Darren Kuang to Inglis 22 October 1948, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 4. Also, Inglis writes to John Cherney about sending copy of *Probuzhdenie* to Ba Jin. See Inglis to Cherney, 29 June 1949 and 16 December 1949, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 4. John Cherney seems to pop up in the acknowledgment section of Paul Avrich’s *The Russian Anarchists*. The Labadie Collection and IISH has collection of *Probuzhdenie* and some of Cherney’s letters, but there seems to be a lack of biographical information on Cherney, who was a Russian anarchist living in the United States.
[689] Li Pei-kan to Inglis, 6 February 1949, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 13.
[690] See Li Pei-kan to Inglis, 8 November 1948, 6 February 1949, 14 February 1949, 9 March 1949, 7 May 1949, 29 October 1949, 31 December 1949, 26 April 1950, and 18 September 1950, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 13.
[691] Li Pei-kan to Inglis, 31 December 1949, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 13.
[692] Further work: See his bio for his thoughts on his mom, see his novels for depictions of his female characters (Lang’s bio is a help), see also examples of his anarchist writings, particularly his bios of important women in the Russian Revolution, etc.
[693] Inglis to Li Pei-kan, 28 February 1950, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 13. Inglis also notes her work with Ba Jin on Nina van Zandt to Johanna Boetz Clevans, see Inglis to Clevans, 25 January 1949, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 4.
[694] Inglis to Ba Jin, 27 November 1949, Box 13.
[695] Ba Jin to Inglis, 19 October 1948, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 13.
[696] The Inglis Papers has a separate note of her Shanghai address and phone number, but this information is an a hand other than Inglis’s. It could be either an aide or a later curator’s note, or even from Darren herself. It is not known whether Inglis further corresponded with Darren after her return to China. The last mention of Darren is her return to Shanghai at the end of 1950. See Ba Jin to Inglis 18 September 1950, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 13.
[697] Martin Gudell was a Lithuania-born anarchist who moved to Chicago after the Spanish Civil War ended. He was in close contact with Agnes Inglis and she personally asked him to help look after Darren while she was in Chicago. Harry Kelly was involved in numerous anarchist-inspired modern schools in New York and New Jersey. Inglis too introduced Darren to Kelly, emphasizing Darren’s connection to Ba Jin, “The young man of years ago who wrote to you...on account of your ideas.” See Inglis to Gudell, 22 August 1948, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 9; and Inglis to Kelly, 28 June 1948, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 12. Rocker first met Darren in Chicago in 1949. See Harry Kelly to Rudolf Rocker, 15 March 1949, IISH ARCH01194.131
[698] Zhu Xi was an influential biologist in China. He went to France in 1920 with the Diligent Work-Frugal Study program. He eventually spent a decade there, earning his doctorate. He returned to China in 1932. Towards the end of the 30s, he translated Kropotkin’s *Mutual Aid* and wrote a lengthy essay about how the process of mutual aid functioned in Chinese society. His name was also romanized as Tchou Su, and it was under this spelling that he was known to Agnes Inglis.
[699] Ba Jin and Inglis’s correspondence began in 1948, while Jones’s letters to Inglis resumed in 1949. See the following paragraph and n. 53 for further details.
[700] See Ray Jones to Inglis, 13 February 1936, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 11.
[701] Leads into Ray Jones and existing Chinese anarchist networks in America are covered in Chapter 3. Also see Him Mark Lai, “Anarchism, Communism, and China’s Nationalist Revolution,” 53–76; and Kenyon Zimmer, “Positively Stateless: Marcus Graham, the Ferrero-Sallitto Case, and Anarchist Challenges to Race and Deportation,” in *The Rising Tide of Color: Race, State Violence, and Radical Movements across the Pacific* (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014), 128–158, and Zimmer, *Immigrants Against the State*, 182–184.
[702] See Pino, “Correspondants de l’étranger: dernières traces (1948–1950),” for overview of surviving correspondence of Ba Jin.
[703] See Inglis’s correspondence with Johanna Boetz Clevans as well as her correspondence with Harry Kelly and John Cherney. See Inglis to Kelly, 22 August 1948, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 12; and Inglis to Cherney, 29 June 1948, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 4.
[704] In the larger scheme of things, this gap seems did not preoccupy the 1949–1950 correspondence between Inglis and Jones. In the intervening years, both could have been busy with their own activities and have forgotten about the brief exchange in the 1930s. That this gap was brought to light certainly was a result of Inglis’s meticulous record keeping in managing the Labadie Collection.
[705] So far, I have not found anything to explain this gap in communication. At the very least, this can be simply the vicissitudes of Jones’s own living and work situation and where he chose to focus his activities. Perhaps Jones and the Equality Society’s initial donations were meant to be nothing more than a one-off, and Ba Jin’s donations to the Labadie Collection were unrelated to Jones’s earlier offerings.
[706] See n. 132 in Chapter 2 for further details.
[707] Inglis to Li Pei-kan, 4 June 1948, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 13.
[708] Inglis to Li Pei-kan, 4 June 1948, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 13.
[709] In her first known letter to Ray Jones in 1934, Inglis directly asks Jones how he learned of the Collection. She asks whether it was through contact with Marcus Graham, an influential anarchist writer, or through a Michigan graduate living in San Francisco. See Inglis to Jones, 2 December 1934, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 11.
[710] Li Pei-kan to Inglis 3 July 1948, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 13.
[711] Inglis to Li Pei-kan, 4 June 1948, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 13.
[712] Inglis to Li Pei-kan, 24 May 1950, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 13.
[713] Li Pei-kan to Inglis, 18 September 1950, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 13.
[714] Ba Jin, “‘Wo de zizhuan’ xinban qianji” 《我的自传》新版前记, in *Wuzhengfuzhuyi pipan—Kelupaotejin zai* *Zhongguo* 《无政府主义批判——克鲁泡特金在中国》, 100–101.
[715] Inglis to Li Pei-kan, 24 May 1950, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 13.
[716] Li Pei-kan to Liu Zhongshi (Ray Jones), 1929. Ray Jones Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, Box1, Folder 5.
[717] Agnes Inglis to Harry Kelly, 28 June 1948, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 12. In her first mention of Darren Kuang to Ba Jin, Inglis indicates that Darren’s initial visit to the library and Labadie Collection was prompted by Harry Kelly himself. See Agnes Inglis to Li Pei-Kan, 2 September 1948, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 13.
[718] Ibid.
[719] Tchou Su refers to Ba Jin’s old friend, Zhu Xi, the anarchist biologist, who would later be at the Shanghai Institute for Experimental Biology in the 1950s, the same time Darren returned to China to work there.
[720] Inglis to Kelly, 28 June 1948, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 12.
[721] *The Road to Freedom* was a New York-based anarchist journal and ran for much of the 1920s. See Andrew Cornell, *Unruly Equality* for more info.
[722] Inglis to Kelly, 28 June 1948, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 12.
[723] Agnes Inglis, diary entry, 14 August 1948, Agnes Inglis Papers. In the last sentence of this entry, Inglis remarks that both Harry Kelly and Ba Jin (Li Pei-Kan) would like to know of Darren’s situation. At the time, the AuburnGresham neighborhood was a working-class neighborhood heavily dominated by persons and families of Germanic and Northern European ethnicities. It was conveniently located next to major transportation networks along the Halstead Street corridor, but as will be demonstrated in the course of Darren’s correspondences, it was isolated from what would be her anarchist networks as it was considerably further south than where her comrades lived. Even today, it takes over 90 minutes to travel by public transportation from Auburn Gresham to the Northside Humboldt Park neighborhoods, where the likes of Boris Yelensky and Martin Gudell lived.
[724] Agnes Inglis to Martin Gudell, 22 August 1948, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 9.
[725] Darren Kuang Chen to Agnes Inglis, 3 September 1948, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 4.
[726] Agnes Inglis to Harry Kelly, 22 August 1948, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box, 12. Anna Sosnovsky Winokur (19001949) was an organizer with the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and anarchist propagandist. She was arrested for protesting the United States’s involvement in WWI and sentenced to be deported. Escaping deportation, she was heavily involved in anarchist and union activities and was heavily involved in anarchist efforts to free Sacco and Vanzetti. She is buried in Forest Home Cemetery in Chicago, which his home to numerous gravesites and monuments to anarchist and other radical labor activists, including Voltarine de Cleyre and Emma Goldman’s graves and a sculpture dedicated to the Chicago Haymarket Martyrs. See [[http://foresthomecemeteryoverview.weebly.com/ann-sosnovsky-winokur.html][foresthomecemeteryoverview.weebly.com]]
[727] Martin Gudell (1906–1993) was a Lithuanian-American anarchist activist. He was in Spain during the Civil War and served as Emma Goldman’s Spanish language interpreter during her stay there. After Spain, he settled in Chicago.
[728] Agnes Inglis to Martin Gudell, 22 August 1948, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 9.
[729] Martin Gudell to Agnes Inglis, 7 August 1948, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 9. The letter is dated August 7 but is postmarked September 7. Given the timeline of Darren’s move to Chicago, the postmark would be the more likely date. In a letter dated September 9, Inglis writes to Darren that she has heard from Gudell that he plans to visit soon. In this letter, she also lets Darren know of Gudell’s background in the Spanish Civil War. Agnes Inglis to Darren Kuang Chen, 9 September 1948, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 4.
[730] Martin Gudell to Agnes Inglis, 18 September 1948, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 9.
[731] Martin Gudell to Agnes Inglis, 23 September 1948, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 9.
[732] Ibid.
[733] Ibid.
[734] Chang Yen to Martin Gudell, 28 February 1935 and 22 July 1935, IISH ARCH00529.15. Curiously, the IISH archives identify the letter writer as Chang Yan, even though “Ch. Chong” appears in the signature line. This appears to be from confusion over Chuong’s listing of Zhang Yan’s address in Hong Kong in the postscript.
[735] Gudell to Inglis, 23 September 1948, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 9.
[736] Ibid.
[737] Ibid.
[738] Ibid.
[739] Gudell to Inglis 22 December 1948, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 9.
[740] Darren Kuang Chen to Inglis, 3 March 1949, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 4.
[741] Ibid. In this letter, Darren lets Inglis know that Ba Jin is now busy translating Rudolf Rocker’s biography of important literary characters, *The Six*.
[742] Darren Kuang Chen to Inglis 22 October 1948, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 4.
[743] Ba Jin to Rudolf Rocker, n.d. 1948, IISH ARCH01194.149. Ba Jin appears to have received more from Rocker in the 1920s. In a separate letter, he mentions to Rocker that “I also kept in possession your ‘Hinter Stacheldraht und Gitter’, which you sent me together with the biography of J. Most.” See Ba Jin to Rudolf Rocker, 28 December 1948. Johann Most (1846–1906) was a German-American anarchist political figure. Most’s radical career began in Germany where he held a seat in the Reichstag with the Social Democrats. His advocacy of revolutionary violence and ‘propaganda by the deed’ distanced him from the Social Democrats and forced him into exile in London, where he eventually allied himself with anarchists. In 1881, in the pages of his paper, *Freiheit*, Most celebrated the assassination of Czar Alexander II. This earned him a spell in prison. After his release in 1882, he moved to the United States, settling in New York. He continued his promotion of revolutionary violence through the papers he published. It was Most’s arguments for propaganda by the deed that inspired Alexander Berkman’s attempt to assassinate the industrialist Henry Clay Frick in 1892. Ba Jin’s apparent interest in Most can be seen in light of his support of revolutionary terror as symptomatic of a pure soul attempting to live in a bleak and corrupted world. See discussion of Ba Jin’s positions on terror in the Introduction and Chapter 2.
[744] Ba Jin to Rudolf Rocker, 28 December 1948, IISH ARCH01194.149.
[745] Ba Jin to Rudolf Rocker, 4 February 1950, IISH ARCH01194.149.
[746] Ba Jin to Rudolf Rocker, 28 December 1948, IISH ARCH01194.149. “El Pensamiento” appears to be *Pioneers of American Freedom: Origins of Liberal and Radical Thought in America*, a series of essays published in 1949 in the United States. These essays were originally written in German and translation into English did not begin until 1941. However, the Spanish edition appeared in Buenos Aires in 1944 published by Editorial Americalee. “Socialismo Constructivo” was translated from the German by Diego Abad de Santillan and published in Argentina in 1934. “A-Syndicalism” is most likely Rocker’s *Anarcho-Syndicalism*, which was published in London by Secker and Warburg in 1938. This was Rocker’s attempt to both write a history of anarchism, tracing it through the advent of syndicalism and 19th century workers’ movements and lay out methods by which workers may achieve their liberation. First published in 1937, *Nationalism and Culture* is Rocker’s most well-known book, attracting attention from the likes of Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, and *The New Republic*. In this tome, Rocker critiques both religion and economic materialism as incomplete visions of human experience and then moves to refute the nation as a valid means of organizing human society. Ba Jin states to Rocker that he lost it at some point in transit from Guilin to Shanghai in 1939.
[747] Here the timeline is not clear as to exactly when Ba Jin sent the copy of his translation to Cuba. But in an undated letter in 1948, Ba Jin mentions sending his translation of Rocker’s pamphlet to Cuba “several months ago.” See Ba Jin to Rudolf Rocker, n.d. 1948, IISH ARCH01194.149. In a 1972 interview, Cuban anarchist, Marcelo Salinas, later published in Paul Avrich’s collection of interviews with anarchists, reminisced that “After the Second World War, by the way, our group in Havana got several letters—in French, I think—from Li Pei-kan in China. What has become of him?” See Avrich, *Anarchist Voices*, 398.
[748] Ba Jin to Rudolf Rocker 28 December 1948, IISH ARCH01194.149. The identity of Comrade Alonso is not clear, but a likely candidate would be Domingo Alonso, who edited the book review section of *Solidaridad Gastronomico*, which served as the organ of the Associación Libertaria de Cuba (ALC) from 1949 onwards. *Solidaridad* prior existences was as a monthly for food workers before becoming the ALC’s official organ, so it does make sense that Ba Jin would call this group the ‘Solidaridad’ group. The ALC was formed around 1940, joining together Cuban and exiled Spanish anarchist groups on the island. Once *Solidaridad* became its organ, the journal became one of the most well-known radical papers in Cuba. It lasted until 1960, being among the last independent outlets shut down by Castro’s government. See Frank Fernández, *Cuban Anarchism: The History of a Movement*, trans. Chaz Bufe (Tucson, AZ: See Sharp Press, 2001), 42–45 for an overview of the ALC and *Solidaridad*.
[749] Diego Abad de Santillan was perhaps the most well-known and influential anarchists in Argentina and Spain. Spanish by birth, Santillan spent his youth in Argentina. He was active in the Argentine Federación Obrera Regional Argentina (FORA), was a member of the Federación Anarquista Iberia (FAI) in Spain in the 1930s and served as the Minister of Economics in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War. He would have been acquainted with Rocker attending the IWMA congresses in Berlin in 1921. He translated Rocker’s works into Spanish on numerous occasions. His papers can be found at the IISH.
[750] As with other examples, Ba Jin’s time in Paris is key, and future research needs to more broadly search for correspondences between Chinese anarchists and periodicals worldwide. As with his likely introduction to the Labadie Collection, Ba Jin was possibly introduced to Santillan, *La Protesta*, and other Argentine journals through mentions elsewhere. Lu Jianbo is another possible connection with his links to Spanish-speaking anarchists in the US and Latin America. His response to the *Revista Única* survey in 1927 appeared in the pages of *La Protesta*.
[751] Ba Jin to Rudolf Rocker, 24 August 1950, IISH ARCH01194.149.
[752] Ba Jin to Rudolf Rocker 4 February 1950, IISH ARCH01194.149.
[753] Ba Jin to Rudolf Rocker 28 December 1948. Have not found information about this periodical, but it is probable that Santillan was involved. As to whether Ba Jin received the books requested, we do not as yet have verification.
[754] A possible reason for these Latin American connections has to do with the presence of numerous Spanish anarchists exiled in Latin America after the Second World War. As seen in the previous Chapter, Lu Jianbo became involved with Victor García , a globe-trotting Spanish anarchist who lived in Mexico and Venezuela after the war. Garcia’s activities fostered connections with Yamaga Taiji and other anarchists in Japan and it is most likely through these connections that some aspects of these incipient Post-War Chinese-Latin American anarchist connections emerged. See Evans, “Uprooted Cosmopolitans?,” 335–336.
[755] Rocker was, after all, an influential member of the Free Workers Union of Germany and secretary to the International Working Men’s Association, the anarcho-syndicalist international congress founded in the 1920s.
[756] See the May Day 1921 issue of *Rensheng*, one of the first anarchist journals Ba Jin edited for an idea of how important labor was to anarchists in China.
[757] Ba Jin to Rudolf Rocker, 8 February 1950, Ba Jin to Rudolf Rocker, 24 August 1950, IISH ARCH01194.149.
[758] Ibid.
[759] Ibid.
[760] Ba Jin to Rudolf Rocker, 16 March 1949, IISH ARCH01194.149.
[761] Ba Jin to Rudolf Rocker, 28 February 1950, IISH ARCH01194.149.
[762] See Angel Pino, “Ba Jin as Translator” for an in-depth discussion of Ba Jin’s translation methodology. Pino remarks that Ba Jin did not position himself as possessing some highly theorized notion of translation. Ba Jin’s method was to use compile his own translation of a work from combing through translations in different languages. Were he to have a Yiddish edition of Rocker’s writings, he would use it to compare against any extant edition he may have on hand. See Darren’s comments above.
[763] Darren Kuang Chen to Rudolf Rocker, February/March 1950, *Rudolf Rocker Papers*, IISH ARCH01194.81.
[764] Ba Jin to Rudolf Rocker, 24 August 1950, IISH ARCH01194.149.
[765] Harry Kelly to Rudolf Rocker, 15 March 1949, *Rudolf Rocker Papers*, IISH ARCH01194.131.
[766] Darren Kuang Chen to Rudolf Rocker, May/June 1949 and June/July 1949, IISH ARCH01194.81. Also see Baila Round Shargel, “Leftist Summer Colonies of Northern Westchester County, New York,” *American Jewish History* 83(3), (September 1995): 341–343 for a critical take on how leftist/anarchist colonies like Mohegan were.
[767] Darren Kuang Chen to Rudolf Rocker, May/June 1949, IISH ARCH01194.81.
[768] Martin Gudell to Agnes Inglis, 31 August 1949, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 9.
[769] Martin Gudell to Agnes Inglis, 28 November 1949, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 9.
[770] Martin Gudell to Agnes Inglis, 23 February 1950, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 9.
[771] Martin Gudell to Agnes Inglis, 1 July 1950, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 9.
[772] Ibid. In the previous year, after moving to New York, she expressed unease to Rocker about China’s political situation, remarking negatively that at the time, the country appeared to be headed towards a coalition government that would unfortunately be dominated by the communists, making it effectively a communist dictatorship. See Darren Kuang Chen to Rudolf Rocker, May/June 1949, IISH ARCH01194.81.
[773] Harry Kelly to Milly Witkop (Rocker), 1 June 1950, IISH ARCH01194.131.
[774] Liu Chuang to Rudolf Rocker, 18 May 1950, *Rudolf Rocker Papers*, IISH ARCH01194.151.
[775] Ibid.
[776] Liu Chuang to Rocker, 10 March 1946, IISH ARCH01194.151.
[777] A great example of Liu’s expressing his inspiration from Rocker and Kelly can be seen in his 31 August 1946 letter to Rocker. Currently, around 11 letters from Liu to Rocker are archived with Rocker’s papers at the IISH. From Liu’s letters, it can be surmised there are at least a 1 or 2 more letters in the correspondence, including parcels of books and pamphlets, from him to Rocker. This of course, is leaving out Rocker’s responses to Liu. As far as Liu’s correspondence with Kelly, this has not yet been found. In Paul Avrich’s study of the Modern Schools in New Rochelle and Stelton, he mentions that Kelly’s papers are largely missing, and those traces of his correspondence that do exist are scattered among various locations.
[778] For most of their correspondence, Liu lists a friend’s address as his own. Presumably, he had most of his mail sent in the care of various colleagues.
[779] Liu Chuang to Rocker, 31 November 1946, IISH ARCH01194.151. Liu mentions that as of 1946, he had been in contact with Kelly for around ten years.
[780] Liu Chuang to Rocker, 10 March 1946, IISH ARCH01194.151. In this letter, Liu mentions he was a middleschool student in his teens in Shanghai. However, when he later went to Singapore in 1948, he ended up seemingly affiliated with the Chin Kang School, which was the educational branch of the Chin Kang Huay Kuan, which was the native place association for the Jinjiang region in Fujian, which is in the Quanzhou region. This is just speculation, however. Liu does talk about his school experiences reading Rocker and Harry Kelly, and all indications in the correspondence were that this occurred in Shanghai. So, were he to have attended Pingmin in Quanzhou, it would have been before he came to Shanghai for senior middle school.
[781] Liu Chuang to Rocker, 31 November 1946, IISH ARCH01194.151. Here, Liu is most likely referring to the New York-based *Road to Freedom* and not the London-based *Freedom*. Kelly did have a hand in editing both, but he editorship of *Freedom* was in the first decade of the century. Further, any contact address of his listed in the paper would have been in the UK. Kelly was only in England from 1898 through 1904.
[782] Ibid.
[783] Ibid. In one sense, Kelly actually introduced Liu to Rocker twice. Sometime in their initial exchanges in 1936, Kelly sent Liu a copy of one of Rocker’s pamphlets on Spain. This pamphlet would prove inspirational to Liu’s activities. Liu and his friends would translate this pamphlet into Chinese and publish it. Later, after he began writing to Rocker, Liu offered to find a copy and send to Rocker.
[784] Liu Chuang to Rocker, 31 November 1946, IISH ARCH01194.151. Obviously, there is no November 31, so either this letter is misdated or is perhaps a copy of Liu’s original letter. In the IISH archives, this appears as the fifth letter in the series, but it is very clearly not. Liu’s address of Rocker, the unfamiliarity that pervades the letter’s tone, and the initial life story he provides are all clues as to this being most likely the initial letter.
[785] This phrase first shows up in 1948 and continues through in various forms to the end of the correspondence.
[786] This is most apparent in 1950, after it seems Liu has given up on going to the United States. See Liu Chuang to Rudolf Rocker 18 May 1950, IISH ARCH01194.151.
[787] Liu Chuang to Rudolf Rocker, 13 August 1946, IISH ARCH01194.151. In this and previous letters, Liu cites lack of available funds for his delay. Another, longer lasting reason was anti-Chinese riots in Singapore at the time. Haven’t found too much yet on these and need to look.
[788] Liu Chuang to Rudolf Rocker, 1 March 1948, IISH ARCH01194.151. Here Liu lets Rocker know that passport problems held him up in Hong Kong. Apparently, Liu was to leave for Singapore at the end of 1947, but these issues took a few months to resolve.
[789] Liu Chuang to Rudolf Rocker, 7 June 1948, IISH ARCH01194.151.
[790] Liu Chuang to Rocker, 25 September 1948, IISH ARCH01194.151.
[791] Liu Chuang to Rocker, 30 January 1950, IISH ARCH01194.151.
[792] Ibid.
[793] Liu Chuang to Rocker, 19 September 1950, IISH ARCH01194.151.
[794] Li Pei-Kan to Agnes Inglis, 28 September 1950, Box 13, Folder 13, Agnes Inglis Papers, The Joseph Labadie Collection, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
[795] Constance Bantman, “Jean Grave and French Anarchism: A Relational Approach (1870s-1914,” *International* *Review of Social History* 62, no. 3 (December 2017): 451–477. Bantman’s analytic framework rests on viewing Grave as a clearinghouse of correspondence. He wrote widely and frequently to anarchist colleagues, even as his place within anarchist movements faded. As seen in Chapter 2 and elsewhere, he had extensive contact with Chinese anarchists and served as a paternal figure offering sage advice. In the case of our Chinese anarchists, such an approach is fruitful in that it allows us to get past discussions of ideology and into how they related to each other both as comrades in a movement looking to accomplish something and as like-minded friends who enjoyed each other’s physical and epistolary company.
[796] See Ba Jin’s renunciation of his anarchist beliefs in his later addendum to his “Wo de younian”: “Fuzhu: guanyu ‘annaqi zhuyi’ de yitiao zhuwen” 《附注：关于‘安那期主义’的一条注文》 [An Annotation About Anarchism], in *WSZX*, 1007–1008. This note was originally appended to his childhood memoir as it appears in the 1959 edition of his collected works. In this piece, Ba Jin lays blame on his lack of determination to break free from his petty bourgeoisie social circles and idealism. Ba Jin also wrote a similar essay as an afterword to his 1959 collected works. As cited in Chapter 5, similar sentiments appeared in a postscript in a 1970s edition of his collected works as well.
[797] See Ba Jin’s writings on Auschwitz in *Ba Jin Quanji* 《巴金全集》 [Ba Jin’s Complete Works], vol. 18 (Beijing: Renmin daxue chubanshe, 1990).
[798] Qian Liqun, “Du Ba Jin ‘Suixiang Lu’ wu ben (jie xuan)” 《读巴金 《随想录》五本（节选）》 [Reading the Five Volumes of Ba Jin’s *Random Thoughts* (Excerpts)], Wechat, accessed 17 February 2020, [[https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/edqL6g5EVKBcAQAGZbF4oQ][mp.weixin.qq.com]]. In this piece, Qian’s description of Ba Jin’s calls for conscience and truth echo larger sentiments that he represents the nation’s conscience. In a similar manner to Lu Xun, Ba Jin is being transformed into a paragon of virtue and steadfastness.
[799] See both Avrich, *Anarchist Voices*, 410, and relevant sections in Chapter 3.
[800] See Jones’s poems as collected in his files from the Berkeley Ethnic Studies Library as detailed in Chapter 3.
[801] Victor García’s wanderings and Experantist activities placed him the orbit of Japanese anarchists and soon came into contact with Chinese anarchists, including Lu Jianbo. In the early 1960s, he wrote short histories of anarchist movements in China and Japan. Another possibility through which Garcia could have known Lu Jianbo and other Chinese anarchists was his acquaintance with MPT Acharya. Nick Heath has asserted that Acharya and Lu began corresponding sometime in the 1930s. Personal correspondence via Academia.edu with Ole Birk Lauren, 6 April 2020. See Nick Heath, “Acharya, MPT (1887–1954),” *Libcom.org*, 29 November 2012, [[https://libcom.org/history/acharya-mpt-1887-1951][libcom.org]]. García spent three months with Yamaga Taiji sometime during the late 1950s or early 1960s. This is another possibility of how García came to know Lu. See Fernando Arcos, “Germinal Gracia: The Marco Polo of Anarchism,” *The Fifth Estate*, no. 338 (Winter 1992), [[https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/338-winter-1992/germinal-gracia/][www.fifthestate.org]], accessed 18 August 2020. Of course, the most probable means by which García and Lu Jianbo became acquainted was through the latter’s correspondence with Spanish anarchist organs.
[802] See Nick Heath, “Lu Jianbo,” for additional details. The archives at the Chinese University of Hong Kong holds Ma Schmu’s correspondence with Lu Jianbo, Ba Jin, and Ray Jones as well as some letters to Darren Kuang Chen. Ma Schmu also was in contact with the Labadie Collection in the 1960s, even donating copies of a photostat of a fan once gifted to Yamaga Taiji by Shifu. The fan is adorned with quotes from Kropotkin and Proudhon in Shifu’s calligraphy. Though there was some initial chaos in maintaining the collection Inglis had amassed after her passing in 1954, the Joseph Labadie Collection has remained an important archive of anarchist and other radical materials.
[803] See Ba Jin, “Zhongyi be qianji” 《中译本前记》 [Forward to the Chinese Translation], in Li Cunguang, ed, *Wuzhengfu zhuyi pipan – Kelupaotejin zai Zhongguo* 《无政府主义批判——克鲁泡特金在中国》 [An Anarchist Critique – Kropotkin in China] (Nanchang: Jiangxi gaoxiao chubanshe, 2009), 85. Also see Laurence Schneider, *Biology and Revolution in Twentieth-Century China* (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 126–127, which offers a snapshot of Zhu’s exploits in the early 1950s. For Darren’s employment, see Ba Jin to Agnes Inglis, 18 September 1950, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 13. Also see an info sheet in attached to her correspondence with Inglis that lists her Shanghai address, her place of employment (the then Shanghai Experimental Biological Institute), and her phone number. Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 4.
[804] Darren Kuang Chen’s child’s name was listed as William Staats Chen, with Staats being the surname of the family that looked after her. See Darren Kuang Chen to Agnes Inglis, 3 March 1949, Agnes Inglis Papers, Box 4.
[805] Refer to Chapter 4 for a refresher.
[806] See Chen Xiuju, “Ronghe xiaoyuan wenhua pinpai jianshe de gaoxiao tushuguan yuedu tuiguang—yi Liming zhiye daxue wei li”, 62–64.
[807] Pang Xianzhi and Jin Chongji, eds., *Mao Zedong Chuan, vol. 1* 《毛泽东传，第一卷》 [Biography of Mao Zedong, vol. 1] (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 1996), 45–46.
[808] Mao Zedong, “Minzhong de da lianhe (jielu)” 《民众的大联合（节录）》 [The Great Union of the Popular Masses (Excerpts), in *Wuzhengfu pipan*, 217. An English translation can be found in “The Great Union of the Popular Masses,” in *Mao’s Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings, 1912–1949, Vol. 1: The Pre-Marxist Period, 1912–1920*, ed. Stuart Schram (Armonk, NY and London: M.E. Sharpe, 1992), 380.
[809] See the structure of anarchist history as produced by veteran scholars, Lu Zhe and Tang Tingfen. Both follow this line of argumentation, that anarchism was no more than a steppingstone to arrive at the correct interpretation of history and revolution. Lu Zhe, *Zhongguo wuzhengfuzhuyi shigao* and Tang Tingfen, *Wuzhengfuzhuyi sichao shihua*.
[810] Alternatively, the ways in which the memory and reception of anarchism and anarchists in China has become unmoored from their historical contexts perhaps represents how anarchism has become something of a floating signifier rather than a description of physical reality and practices whereby concrete transformation could be made. See the essays in Tom Goyens, ed., *Radical Gotham* for an overview of how the anarchist experience in the US changed once anarchism became severed from those ethnic communities that made anarchist practice into daily life.
[811] This comes back to discussions of Max Nettlau, the Austrian anarchist historian who spent his career documenting and creating a narrative of global anarchist movements and whose document later became one of the major components of the IISH archives. Recent theoretical discussions have acknowledged the need to rethink the relationship between anarchist ideologies and anarchist practice and how this affects the writing of the history of anarchism. See Matthew Adams, “The Possibilities of Anarchist History: Rethinking the Canon and Writing History,” *Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies*, no. 1 (2013): 33–63.
[812] Ba Jin was among his correspondents and there is a distinct possibility that Lu Jianbo corresponded with Nettlau as well.
[813] For Nettlau’s contribution to the historiography of Latin American anarchism, see Jorell A. Melendez-Badillo, “The Anarchist Imaginary: Max Nettlau and Latin America,” in Castaneda and Feu, eds., *Writing Revolution*, 177193.
[814] An examination of Inglis’s correspondence reveals just wide known her role as a node of information was. She corresponded with Nettlau and provided materials to him for his own work. She helped Emma Goldman research her memoirs. By all accounts, Inglis was an unsung figure in the maintenance of an anarchist record.
[815] Albert Meltzer, “The Origins of the Anarchist Movement in China” (London: Coptic Press, 1968), 68 pp. Arguably Victor García’s writings on Chinese and Japanese anarchists in the 1960s are earlier, but it is not too widely known how far they circulated outside Spanish-language anarchist circles.
[816] The Swiss-based CIRA was founded in 1957 to preserve and document anarchist movements across the globe. Originally established in Geneva before it moved to its current location in Lausanne, CIRA has a collection of over 20,000 items related to anarchist movements and publications. It, along with the International Institute for Social History and the Joseph Labadie Collection are perhaps the largest repositories of anarchist materials in the world. See its website, [[https://www.cira.ch/][www.cira.ch]] for additional details. CIRA-Nippon is still active and maintains an online repository of its journals as well as a physical library open to visitors. See [[http://cira-japana.net/pr/CIRA][cira-japana.net]] and CIRA-Nippon certainly are not the only anarchist archives in existence. There is also the Kate Sharpley Library in Northern California, [[https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/][www.katesharpleylibrary.net]] as well as the Sparrow’s Nest Library and Archive in Nottingham, [[http://thesparrowsnest.org.uk/][thesparrowsnest.org.uk]] to name but a couple. Outside these more well-known libraries and archives are global webs of anarchist groups, infoshops, bookshops, and other organizations that operate community centers and publish and disseminate anarchist texts. Attempts have been made to compile worldwide contact lists of these spaces and groups. See Dana Williams and Matthew T. Lee, “‘We Are Everywhere’: An Ecological Analysis of Organizations in the Anarchist Yellow Pages,” *Humanity and Society* 32, no. 1 (2008): 45–70. A more recent, but less exhaustive list has been put together by the Slingshot Collective, an anarchist newspaper published out of Berkeley, see “Radical Contact List,” *Slingshotcollective.org*, [[https://slingshotcollective.org][slingshotcollective.org]] /radical-contact-list/, accessed 19 August 2020.
[817] “A Note on *Libero International*,” *Libero International*, no. 1, (1975), Libcom.org, 27 January 2011, [[http://libcom.org/library/note-libero-international][libcom.org]].
[818] Nohara Shiro, “Anarchists and the May Forth Movement in China,” *Libero International*, no. 1(1975), *Libcom.org*, 28 February 2011, [[http://libcom.org/library/anarchists-may-4-movement-china][libcom.org]].
[819] All scholars who produced work at the time that touched one way or another on anarchism and anarchists in China. Scalapino and Yu’s *The Chinese Anarchist Movement* (Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, University of California, 1961) was probably the first academic treatment of Chinese anarchists. Martin Bernal’s *Chinese Socialism to 1907* (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976) ends its narrative in 1907 with anarchism becoming the most influential form of socialism among Chinese intellectuals. Michael Gasster’s *Chinese Intellectuals and the Revolution of 1911* (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969) examines Wu Zhihui and Zhang Binglin’s conceptions of anarchism. Olga Lang, of course, authored the first English-language biography of Ba Jin. Conrad Brandt published extensively on CCP history while Jean Chesneaux’s *The Chinese Labor Movement, 1919–1927* (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968) and Chow Tse-tsung’s *The May 4th Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China* (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960) are still considered classics in the field.
[820] “Asian Anarchism in Western Languages (2),” *Libero International*, no. 3 (1975), Libcom.org, 2 February 2011, [[http://libcom.org/library/asian-anarchism-western-languages-2-china][libcom.org]]. Not ones to be awed by the array of academic clout, the CIRA-Nippon group provided ready criticisms (often negative) of each work: Scalapino and Yu’s monograph painted the anarchists as “losers”; Lang’s biography of Ba Jin lacked detail, but that was more due to Ba Jin’s stance as a “soft anarchist”; and of course, they would not trust Chesneaux’s “Maoist politics to do justice to the anarchists.”
[821] “Group Profile: The 70s Front,” *Libero International*, no. 3 (1975), *Libcom.org*, 2 February 2020, [[http://libcom.org/library/group-profile-hong-kong-70s-front][libcom.org]]. Sources suggest Ma Schmu (mentioned above) playing some role in the 70s Front, but it seems he belonged to an older generation who was more in touch with Ba Jin and Lu Jianbo’s cohort of anarchists. See Nick Heath, “Lu Jianbo.” It is certain that at some point in the 1970s, Ma immigrated to Australia and then to the US, in the area around New York. Earliest records found of his activity date to contacts made to the CIRA in Switzerland in the 1950s. A brief online search yielded a Ma Schmu who lived in New Jersey. Was born in 1936 and passed away in 2016. Further information is needed on this individual, but the dates roughly line up.
[822] Norman Narwocki, “Hong Kong: Where Anarchists and Blackbirds Sing about Freedom,” *The Fifth Estate*, no. 381 (Fall 2009), accessed 18 August 2020, [[https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/381-summer-fall-2009/hong-kong/][www.fifthestate.org]]. One movement the 70s Front became involved in was the Baodiao 报钓 (Protect the Diaoyu Islands) movement, which protested the United States’ return of the Diaoyu Islands (Ryukyu Islands) to Japanese administration. See Luo Yongsheng and Liu Lining, “‘Zhuhai shijian’ – you yi pian dao nian Yin Haiguang wenzhang er qi de Xianggang xuesheng yundong” 《珠海事件——由一篇悼念殷海光文章而起的香港学生运动》[The Zhuhai Incident: How Hong Kong’s Student Movement Arose from an Essay Mourning Yin Haiguang], *Sixiang Xianggang*, no. 8 (December 2015), accessed 8 December 2020, [[https://commons.ln.edu.hk/thinkinghk/][commons.ln.edu.hk]] vol8/iss1/tps://www.thinkinghk.org/v08-01.
[823] Starting from *Minus* 9, *Minus* counted down towards 1984, which was presumably a dark joke about the oncoming doom of Orwell’s future past. For example, the journals produced in 1977, were all titled *Minus* 7, the ones produced in 1978, *Minus* 6, and so on.
[824] An interesting example can be seen in a critique of their own published anthology on the Cultural Revolution, *The Revolution is Dead; Long Live the Revolution: Readings on the Great Proletarian Revolution from an Ultra-Left Perspective*. See Shelby Shapiro, “Book Review,” *Minus 7* (June 1977), 11–17, *Libcom.org*, accessed 8 December 2020, [[https://libcom.org/files/Minus7-June-77.pdf][libcom.org]]; The ‘Free Li-I-Che and Yang Hsi-Kwang’ Action Committee, “Free Li-I-Che! Free Yang Hsi-Kwang!,” *Minus 7* (April/May 1977), 19–20, *Libcom.org*, accessed 18 August 2020, [[https://libcom.org/files/Minus7-April-May-77.pdf][libcom.org]] are some additional examples. For an exhaustive overview of Ultra-Leftist groups in the Cultural Revolution, see Yiching Wu, “The Great Retreat and its Discontents: Re-examining the Shengwulian Episode in the Cultural Revolution.” Also see n. 2 in Chapter 5.
[825] For debates over the CR, see examples in *Freedom* on 27 January 1968 and 27 April 1968. Letters from a Chinese informant going by CJ Tien appeared in *Tierra y Libertad* (courtesy of Victor García) in 1964 and 1968, and in the 29 May 1965 edition of *Freedom* there appears a letter from a CS. An analysis of the veracity of the *Freedom* letter appears here: Wiebieralski, “L’anarchism en Chine de 1949 à 1981,” *Iztok*, no. 4 (1981), *La Presse Anarchiste*, 18 March 2008, [[http://www.la-presse-anarchiste.net/spip.php?article1345#nb18][www.la-presse-anarchiste.net]]. Coverage of the Cultural Revolution appeared fairly frequently in anarchist publications like *Black Flag* and *Direct Action*.
[826] In the comments to the introduction of the *Minus* group on Libcom.org, more than one individual mentions that the *Minus* journal and *Libero International* were the main sources on Asian anarchist movements in the 70s and 80s. See Dan Radinka, “Minus,” *Libcom.org*, 14 May 2017, [[https://libcom.org/history/some-editions-minus-magazinehong-kong-1970s-0][libcom.org]]. Officially, *Minus* was published by the Alternative Press Syndicate, a collective of underground and alternative newspapers and zines started in the US but grew to encompass international papers as well. “Minus,” *Libcom.org*, accessed 18 August 2020, [[https://libcom.org/history/some-editions-minus-magazine-hong-kong-1970s-0][libcom.org]].
[827] “Pa Chin”, *Minus 7* (September-October 1977), Libcom.org, [[https://libcom.org/files/Minus7-Sept-Oct-77.pdf][libcom.org]], accessed 29 February 2020. This is where a split in knowledge comes in. Ba Jin himself admitted that his credentials as a militant anarchist were lacking, and while he agreed with anarchist ideals, he felt he should not be considered an anarchist. However, outside of his official post-1959 ‘renunciations’, it is unclear whether the 70s Front or the Minus Group would have access or have known about Ba Jin’s earlier discussions of his political identity in the 1930s.
[828] “Pa Chin,” *Black Flag* 5, no. 3 (1978),
[829] The trope of anarchist victimhood was nothing new by this point. Anarchists had long identified themselves by their martyrdom to Western liberal states. Their martyrdom at the hands of Marxist-Leninist parties was even more exceedingly bitter. The Anarchist Black Cross, which formed in Chicago in the 1920s, came to be in part because of the oppression Russian anarchists suffered in the USSR. Given what Ba Jin suffered, it is only natural that Western anarchists at the time would view him with a sympathetic lens.
[830] This indeed is the charge that the *Minus* group levels. Olga Lang’s focus on Ba Jin had helped to construct a narrative in which Ba Jin was a major representative of anarchism in China, and this served to obscure other participants.
[831] Dirlik, *Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution*, 46.
[832] Nao, “Huiming Centennial: Why Talk about 1910s Anarchism in the 2010s?,” *Libcom.org*, 5 May 2014, [[https://libcom.org/blog/huiming-english][libcom.org]]. As a group, Nao published extensively on *Libcom.org* in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
[833] See Chuang, “Class Combat,” *Chuang.org*, 7 August 2017, [[http://chuangcn.org/2017/08/class-combat/][chuangcn.org]]. In this article, anarchists in China are used as a historical example in an exploration of place of physical and martial prowess in leftist discourse.
[834] Chuang, “Sorghum and Steel,” *Chuang, vol. 1: Dead Generations* (July 2016), *Chuang.org*, [[http://chuangcn.org/][chuangcn.org]] journal/one/sorghum-and-steel/. Also see, Chuang, “A State Adequate to the Task: Conversations with Lao Xie,” *Chuang, vol. 2: Frontiers* (July 2016), *Chuang.org*, [[http://chuangcn.org/journal/two/an-adequate-state/][chuangcn.org]]. Both accessed 19 August 2020.
[835] CrimethInc., “Hong Kong: Anarchists in the Resistance to the Extradition Bill: An Interview,” *CrimethInc.com*, 22 June 2019, [[https://crimethinc.com/2019/06/22/hong-kong-anarchists-in-the-resistance-to-the-extradition-bill-aninterview][crimethinc.com]]. This was later reposted by Chuang as “Anarchists in the Resistance to the Extradition Bill,” *Chuang.org*, 25 June 2019, [[http://chuangcn.org/2019/06/anti-ex-anarchos/][chuangcn.org]]. Chuang had also posted some brief interviews with protesters from a variety of backgrounds, Chuang, “Other Voices from the Anti-Extradition Movement,” 17 June 2019, [[http://chuangcn.org/2019/06/anti-extradition-translations/][chuangcn.org]].
[836] CrimethInc, “Hong Kong.”
[837] Promise Li, “The Rise and Fall of *The 70s Biweekly*,” *Lausan.hk*, 15 May 2020, [[https://lausan.hk/2020/rise-andfall-of-70s-biweekly/][lausan.hk]].
[838] Promise Li’s retrospective of *The 70s Biweekly* originally appeared online in *The Nation* a month earlier. See Promise Li, “The Radical Magazine That Shaped Hong Kong’s Left,” *The Nation*, 17 April 2020, [[https://www.thenation.com/article/world/hong-kong-leftists-1970s/][www.thenation.com]]; Zeng Xiaoling, “Ways of Seeing: 《70 年代双周刊》50 年来自昨日的自由呼应” [Ways of Seeing: *The 70s Biweekly*, An Echo of Freedom from 50 Years in the Past], *Mingbao*, 5 July 2020, [[https://ol.mingpao.com/ldy/cultureleisure/culture/20200705/1593886189197/ways-ofseeing-%E3%80%8A70%E5%B9%B4%E4%BB%A3%E9%9B%99%E9%80%B1%E5%88%8A%E3%80%8B50%E5%B9%B4-%E4%BE%86%E8%87%AA%E6%98%A8%E6%97%A5%E7%9A%84%E8%87%AA%E7%94%B1%E5%91%BC%E6%87%89][ol.mingpao.com]]. A recent biography of Mok Chiu-yu, a founding member of the 70s Front has been recently published. Jessica Waiyee Yeung, *Xianggang de san daolu: Mo Zhaoru an’naqi minzhong xiju* 《香港第三条道路：莫昭如安那其民众戏剧》 [The Third Path for Hong Kong: Mok Chiu-yu’s Anarchy and People’s Theater] (Hong Kong: Typesetter Publishing, 2019). A review can be found at Chenhuang Jinju, “Geming bu shi shijian, shi richang” 《革命不是事件，是日常》 [Revolution is not an Instance, It is Daily], *New Bloom*, 21 June 2020, [[https://newbloommag.net/2020/06/21/hk-third-path-review/][newbloommag.net]]. Moreover, Hong Kong Baptist University, with the aid of Yeung, Mok, and other members of the 70s Front, has digitized and posted online a vast archive of the groups’ materials. See *The 70s Biweekly and People’s Theater: A Private Archive of Mok Chiu-yu Augustine and Friends*, [[https://digital.lib.hkbu.edu.hk/mok/home/languages/en/][digital.lib.hkbu.edu.hk]].
[839] Ramnath, *Decolonizing Anarchism*, 5–8.