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Beyond the bounds of revolutions : Chinese in transnational anarchist networks from the 1920s to the 1950s

University of British Columbia

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.

Text

2020-12-23

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/76868

History

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/