Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (104 page)

The impact of Western anarchism on China was short-lived but profound. It came with a rush of new political currents at the beginning of the century, arriving more or less simultaneously with liberalism and socialism. The decade following the 1911 Revolution was a period of intellectual and political turmoil. Between 1916 and 1920 anarchist thought probably had its greatest influence on young intellectuals, particularly in South China.

The famous Chinese novelist and translator Pa Chin (Le Fei Kan) also became an anarchist in 1919 after reading an article by Emma Goldman; on several occasions, he called her his ‘spiritual mother’.
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His
nom de plume
Pa Chin was a contraction of Bakunin and Kropotkin. The anarchists also had considerable influence in the federalist movement in China from 1920 to 1923. The General Association of Hunan Workers was led by anarchists and supported the movement. Students in Fukien in their journal
Tzu-chih
(Autonomy) argued that ‘to govern oneself and to be governed are two contradictory things’.
¹¹

But the anarchists were soon eclipsed by the Marxist-Leninists in the mid 1920s. Anarchism paved the way for them by its opposition to tradition, the family and religion, by its stress on progress through science, by its call for a mass movement, even by its puritanical leanings. Apart from the successes of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Leninist theory of tutelage attracted many radical Chinese intellectuals who did not trust the allegedly stubborn and ignorant masses. Unlike anarchism, Leninism also embraced nationalism which helped it draw on a wider base of support.

Anarchism on the other hand is in many ways naturally Chinese, standing in a long tradition going back to Taoism. It is the opposite side of the coin to the Legalist and Confucian tradition, with their emphasis on a centralized State and mandarin rule. Even this century, China has remained relatively decentralized with the State playing only a small controlling part until 1949. Since then Communist China has largely comprised a vast number of relatively self-sufficient communities bound together primarily by a common identity rather than by a uniform administration.
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In the fifties and sixties, Mao’s vision of a decentralized society was
reminiscent of Kropotkin’s. During the Great Leap Forward of 1958 and the Cultural Revolution of 1966–7, the Chinese communists tried to realize in some measure the anarchist ideal of a society of federated self-governing communes, but did so in such an inflexible and ruthless way that, generally speaking, they ushered in decades of misery, violence and injustice for the great mass of the people. Since then the ancient push and pull between the Taoist tendency to sponsor local autonomy and the Legalists’ fondness for centralization has continued, with the central government periodically attempting to reassert control and enforce standardization on wayward regions by enforcing adherence to its national plans.

The anarchist opposition never died in China during the period of communist rule, with libertarians like Shen-wu-lieu keeping its message alive.
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In recent years, the students have been leading the call for more freedom and democracy; there have even been those among them who do not merely want to get rid of the ‘Government of Old Men’ but central government itself. In May 1989, in a great upsurge of libertarian energy, millions of students, workers and civil servants occupied the major cities in a display of non-violent direct action. For weeks, the government lost control over the peaceful demonstrations, which saw workers calling for self-management and students for freedom of speech and assembly. The demonstrations grew into a peaceful popular revolution, with students using the hunger strike to bring Gandhian moral pressure to bear on the tottering government. At one stage, it looked as if the People’s Army would throw in its lot with the pro-democracy movement.

But the octogenarian rulers prevailed. The general secretary of the Communist Party Zhao Ziyan delivered a stern warning: ‘the government could not tolerate a state of anarchy in Beijing’.
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Loyal troops were called up from the provinces. The tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989. Thousands were killed. The eighty-four year-old anarchist novelist Pa Chin, having survived half a century of ‘struggle sessions’, was arrested for expressing sympathy for the demonstrators. The Communist government may have won this time, but the Chinese people are used to long struggles.

Despite the popular Western image of Japan as a conformist, rigidly hierarchical and authoritarian nation, anarchism is not entirely an alien flower. Kōtuku Shūsui, the first to introduce Western anarchism to Japan during the Shōwa era, asserted that an anarchistic spirit of negation in Japanese life can be traced back to the influence of Buddhism (especially Zen) and Taoism.
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An important forerunner of anarchism in seventeenth-century
Japan was also Audō Shōeki who advocated a form of agrarian communism.

The organized anarchist movement did not however get off the ground until 1906 at the time of the authoritarian rule of Emperor Meiji. Kōtoku was of lower Samurai origins but became the most brilliant radical of his generation. He wrote a biography of Rousseau and translated his works. He read Kropotkin whilst in prison during the Russo-Japanese War and habitually called him
sensei
(’teacher’). He became a philosophical materialist and did not shrink from violence. During a stay in California in 1906–7 he even made contact with the Industrial Workers of the World.

On his return, Kōtuku led the anarchist faction within the short-lived Socialist Party of Japan; they caused a split in 1907 and the Party collapsed soon after. With his anarchist comrades, he then began to nudge the embryonic labour movement in an anarcho-syndicalist direction. As editor of the anti-war paper
Heimin
(Common People), he also helped establish the anti-militarist tradition of Japanese anarchism. But he was involved in a plot against the Emperor Meiji and in the rigged High Treason trial of 1910–11, twelve anarchists including himself were executed.
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In prison at the time was another anarchist Ōsugi Sakae who became the next most important thinker to develop anarchism in Japan. He came from a family of eminent soldiers. When he joined Kōtoku’s anti-militarist campaign, he deliberately called himself ‘the son of a murderer’. Of a philosophical and literary turn of mind, he developed his own peculiar form of anarchism under the influence of Stirner, Nietzsche, Bergson and Sorel. He argued that the future growth of society would depend on ‘an unknown factor’ in man’s reasoning to be developed by ‘a minority who would strive for the expansion of each one’s self’.
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Like Sorel, he saw the labour movement as an attempt by the working man to regain himself.

Although the Japanese anarchists and socialists made little impact during the First World War, the success of the Russian Revolution and the fast growth of Japanese industry thereafter encouraged the development of the labour movement. It took place in difficult circumstances: unions were technically illegal and the Public Peace Police Law of 1900 legitimized the habitual intimidation of the workers. Ōsugi was interested in the Comintern but soon broke with those who established the Communist Party in Japan in 1922. He managed to win over a sizeable part of the labour movement to anarcho-syndicalism before being murdered by the military police in 1923. Anarchists then lost ground to the communists and the social democrats in the labour movement. Some anarchists turned to individual acts of terrorism, especially the members of the secret Guillotine Society. Others made a study of European anarchist thinkers, especially William Godwin and Kropotkin.
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During the period of Taishō Democracy, which saw the passing of the Universal Suffrage Act of 1925, the anarchists formed the Black Youth League to oppose the participation of the workers in parliamentary democracy. A school of ‘pure anarchism’ emerged which argued that socialist parties and reformist trade unions only assist the progress of capitalism. They believed that only an anarchist minority could achieve a social revolution by freeing the people from economic exploitation and political power. Not surprisingly, they clashed with the more reformist anarcho-syndicalists.

A leading exponent of ‘pure anarchism’ was Hatta Shūzō. An ex-Christian clergyman who drank himself to death in 1934, he translated the works of Bakunin and Kropotkin into Japanese and kept a picture of Nestor Makhno in his room. But he was not merely an interpreter; he developed Kropotkin’s anarcho-communism in an original way and became its greatest Japanese exponent.
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He saw the central evil of capitalism as the division of labour which prevented workers having an interest or sense of responsibility for what goes on outside their narrow sphere of work. On similar grounds, he criticized the class struggle of the syndicalists and their call for workers’ councils or Soviets since in a post-revolutionary situation such organs would continue the division of labour and require a co-ordinating machinery which would result in a new State. Although he believed in a Bakuninite vanguard of conscious activists, he called on the ‘revolutionary masses’ as a whole to create without a transitional period a decentralized society based on the free commune. Similar to the traditional Japanese village, the commune would be largely self-sufficient, but its members would be allowed to choose their own work and not become narrow specialists.

At the same time, Ishikawa Sanshiro, another anarchist in prison when Kōtoku was murdered, helped form a syndicalist federation in 1926 called
Zenkoku Jiren
(All-Japan Libertarian Federation of Labour Unions). Ishikawa had not only been deeply influenced by Edward Carpenter’s
Towards Democracy
but had spent eight years in exile in Europe, mainly with the Reclus family in Brussels. At first
Zenkoku Jiren
consisted of more than eight thousand workers from twenty-five separate unions. Some of Hatta Shūzō’s most important writings appeared in its
Libertarian Federation Newspaper.
The federation soon developed in a ‘pure anarchist’ direction which led to a syndicalist breakaway in 1929 and the forming of the rival
Nihon Jikyō
(Japanese Libertarian United Conference of Labour Unions).

Zenkoku Jiren
grew to achieve a membership of over sixteen thousand members in 1931, compared to
Nihon Jikyō’s
three thousand. The syndicalist unions, formed mainly of workers in small firms, fought a series of strikes during the depression, but the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 – opposed vehemently by the anarchists — led to their suppression as well as
that of the Left as a whole. A united front against fascism which the anarchists joined was finally crushed with
Zenkoku Jiren
in 1935. Some went on however to fight in the CNT militias during the Spanish Civil War.

After the Second World War the elderly Ishikawa wrote his celebrated anarchist vision of Utopia
Japan Fifty Years Later.
He imagined Japanese society organized on a co-operative basis (with Proudhonist mutual exchange banks) to enable each individual to live a life of artistic creation. His celebration of nudity reflected Carpenter’s influence, but the idea of retaining the Japanese Emperor as the symbol of communal affection was his very own.

In 1946 the Japanese Anarchist Federation was reformed with some syndicalist support. It favoured a revolutionary popular front but became increasingly opposed to the Communists. The Federation collapsed in 1950 along with the Japanese Left, partly due to the repressive policies orchestrated by MacArthur, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, the atmosphere of the Cold War, and the revival of the Japanese economy.

In 1956, the Anarchist Federation reformed with
Kurohata
(Black Flag) as their journal. At its 1958 annual conference, the delegates argued that peaceful co-existence would only serve the rulers of the two superpowers and that the choice was between atomic death and the social revolution. They decided to support the militant students and workers ‘from behind’ and advocated direct action against the danger of a nuclear war. They remained a negligible force within the workers’ movement, but increased support amongst the federation of students unions, the Zengakuren. The latter developed a militant tradition and called for local communes and the taking over of university power. In 1960, the anarchists joined the mainstream of the Zengakuren by calling for fighting rather than demonstration against the military alliance, known as the Security Treaty, with the United States.

A new anarchist theorist Osawa Masamichi emerged at this time. In the journal
Jiyu-Rengo
(Libertarian Federation) which had replaced
Kurohata
, he argued that dehumanization and alienation represented a new type of poverty in mass society and that the social revolution would best be achieved through the gradual structural change of various social groups towards free associations and communes. The revolution would be cultural and social rather than political.

The Vietnam War further mobilized the student movement. The anarchists however saw the danger that the struggle for national independence in underdeveloped countries could lead to national capitalism with a socialist mask at home and promote a world war between the superpowers. A series of direct actions against the war in Vietnam culminated in 1967 in a pitch battle between students and riot police near Haneda airport.
Translations of Marcuse, Guevara and Cohn-Bendit and news of the ‘May Revolution’ in Paris further radicalized the students. The Japanese Anarchist Federation declared a new era of direct action.

The high point of the struggle was the student occupation of Tokyo University which lasted for several months in 1968. One of the leaders of the ‘Council of United Struggle’ at the university declared that they were ‘aristocratic anarchists’ and that their struggle was not on behalf of the maltreated but rather ‘the revolt of the young aristocrats who felt that they had to deny their own aristocratic attributes in order to make themselves truly noble’.
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They happily accepted that epithet thrown by Leninists that their position was an ‘infantile disorder’ since they were involved in a struggle between the generations.