Guangzhou commune

From Anarchy In Action

Shifu, an anarchist influenced by Kropotkin, established the Crock-Crow Society in 1912 in the city of Guangzhou. The Crock-Cow Society published an influential anarchist journal, People's Voice. Shifu and his followers helped launch a number of communal experiments and labor organizing efforts that continued in Guangzhou after Shifu's death in 1915.[1] In Guangzhou, Shifu's followers organized China's first modern labor unions. By 1920 they organized almost forty unions in Guangzhou, including the Teahouse Labor Union in 1918 which had 11,000 members.[2]

Chinese and Korean anarchists collaborated on projects such as the Movement for Rural Self-Defense Communities in Guanzhou in the 1920s. The area "was firmly controlled by the Chinese anarchist Quin Wangshan (1891-1970) under the Quomindang banner, with support from Xu Zhuoran, a graduate of Huangpu Military Academy who sympathized with anarchist ideals."[3]

When the nationalist Quomindang party purged its anarchist members in 1927, many anarchists found refuge in Guangzhou. They called it "a heaven of place," a utopia.[4]

It has been claimed that from 1921 to 1923, "the entire city was run as an anarchist commune"[5] and "the entire city of Guangzhou in China" was "an anarchist commune for a year."[6]

  1. Afir Dirlik, "Anarchism and the Question of Place: Thoughts from the Chinese Experience" in ed. Steven Hirsch and Lucien Van Der Walt, Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870-1940: The Praxis of National Liberation, Internationalism, and Social Revolution (London and Boston: Brill, 2010), 138.
  2. Afir Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Regents of the University of California, 1991), ch. 4. Michael Schmidt, Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism.
  3. Dongyoun Hwang, "Korean Anarchism Before 1945: A Regional and Transnational Approach" in Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 118.
  4. Hwang, "Korean Anarchism Before 1945".
  5. Schmidt, Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism.
  6. Aragorn Eloff, "Anarchism – a scattered history," the overextended memotype, https://meme.co.za/?p=165.