Tag: Liu Shifu

Liu Shifu grew up in a changing time in China’s history. He was born in the 1880’s and died of tuberculosis in 1915, but was still a major figure in the anarchist movement in China. There were many movements that were slowly forming in the time period of Liu Shifu, and his dedication to the movement helped shape it to continue after he was gone. The chapter The New Beginning: Shifu Launches the Conscience Society in the book Shifu, Soul of Chinese Anarchism by Edward S. Krebs detailed the later years of Shifu when he gains importance in China, started the Conscience Society and a printing press owned by himself and his close friends and family, spread his message through China, and unfortunately died of tuberculosis before his work is done. Shifu was astoundingly dedicated to his values of anarchism that he writes in 1912 with his close group of friends and colleagues, and they guided how he taught and lived anarchism for the three chaotic and jam packed years of his life before he died.

In 1912, Shifu and his close compatriots convened for the spring and summer, during which Shifu created a list of twelve points that were “essential” to his personal brand of anarchism.¹ The twelve points were abstinence from meat, liquor, tobacco, servants, riding in sedan chairs or rickshaws, marriage, use of the family name, serving as an official, a member of a representative body, a political party, the army or navy, and religion.¹ For the rest of his life, he committed himself to these values. While his colleagues would ride rickshaws to a block before their office where they printed their paper and taught about anarchism, and then walk the last block, Shifu would walk every day back and forth.² When his doctor suggested that he eat meat in order to help his ailing health that turned into tuberculosis that killed him in 1915, he refused because of his promise to never eat meat, as it was seen as upholding the labor structure of the corrupt government. His values above everything else earned him the nickname of “Mr. Earnest” by his fellows, and was mainly a good way to describe Shifu in his quest for anarchism.²

There are many things that can be said about Shifu’s dedication to the cause of anarchism and his commitment to his values, however, there are places within his life where he seemed to be hypocritical in his values. Shifu’s continued closeness to his siblings and employment of them when printing the Cock-Crow Record in in the face of one of his 12 points, do not use a family name. His belief that family should not be especially important in an individuals life is forgotten when it came to his own siblings and their prominence in his employment of them. One of his sisters married one of his friends who was also intimately involved with his cause. His fathers support and familial monetary funds that went into his printing press also showed his blindness towards his values. “Did he fail to see the irony in this situation?” the text asked, voicing the question that I also had when thinking of his title as “Mr. Earnest”.³ Additionally, Shifu’s partner, Ding Xiangtian, felt no support or affection from Shifu when she was pregnant with their daughter in 1912.² After she was born, he refused to create a public nursery to raise his child in.⁴  To him it was compromising his values, but in doing so, he was leaving his child to no education or support from her father.

While Shifu was determined to stay true to his values of anarchism and the twelve points that were made by the group in 1912, Mr. Earnest may have strayed from being totally earnest in his dedication to anarchism.

1. Edward S. Krebs, Shifu, Soul of Chinese Anarchism (1998) pp. 102. [↩] [↩]
2. Edward S. Krebs, Shifu, Soul of Chinese Anarchism (1998) pp. 115. [↩] [↩] [↩]
3. Edward S. Krebs, Shifu, Soul of Chinese Anarchism (1998) pp. 108, 115. [↩]
4. Edward S. Krebs, Shifu, Soul of Chinese Anarchism (1998) pp.116. [↩]

In his work on the Chinese anarchist Liu Shifu, later simply Shifu (1884-1915), Edward Krebs devotes a chapter to the remarkable 1912 transformation of an anti-Manchu assassin into an a self-proclaimed “apostle of anarchism” who rejected violence as an effective means of acheiving social revolution.¹

A core component of this transformation was the creation and elaboration of a series of moral pledges that, beyond his immediate rejection of violence, help us understand the ways in which these radical movements could move well beyond the kind of associations that might come to mind when we think of “anarchists” if we have not studied these movements in greater depth and have only popular cultural references to go by. One thing we might associate with anarchism is the goal of liberation from, not only oppressive state power, but, presumably, oppressive rules and regulations surrounding individual conduct. Presumably, according to anarchist ideals, this will unleash the formerly repressed natural “social” and compassionate tendencies of humanity and establish a kind of socialist utopia that does not need the artificial oppressive structures of the state to thrive.

In the course of his tranformation, however, Shifu and his close collaborators embraces a set of moral principles. The 12 articles of what Krebs translates as the “Conscience Covenant” (心社社约十二条 – 12 article covenant of the Xinshe, literally heart society) are:

1) Do not eat meat 不食肉
2) Do not drink liquor 不飲酒
3) Do not smoke tobacco 不吸煙
4) Do not use servants 不用僕役
5) Do not ride in sedan chairs or rickshaws 不坐轎及人力車
6) Do not marry 不婚姻
7) Do not use a family name 不稱族姓
8) Do not serve as an official 不作官吏
9) Do not serve as a member of a representative body 不作議員
10) Do not join a political party 不入政黨
11) Do not serve in the army or navy 不作海陸軍人
12) Do not believe in a religion 不奉宗教  ²

Of these, it is relatively easy to connect points 4-12 to principles prevalent in anarchist thought, not only in China, but elsewhere. They may be read as avoiding behavior that proliferates the kind of oppressive society that anarchism’s concept of social revolution wants to oppose. Starve these institutions of your participation, and you can uncover our natural humanity underneath.

What is more interesting, however, are the elements 1-3, which we might associate more commonly with the influence of religious asceticism (the connection between religion, especially Pure Land buddhism and anarchism is taken up by other readings from our module). According to Krebs, Shifu argued that these “polluting” or “crude” desires had to be elimited to allow humanity to develop its character, and notes that some western anarchists such as Leo Tolstoy, also embraced vegetarianism.³ Laudable though we might find the principles, we should note how relatively arbitrary this could become, however: if this line of argument is embraced, with its combination of negative and positive imperatives on conduct, might there not be the risk of other rules of conduct sneak in here, threatening either to reinforce forms of societal oppression on the one hand, or leave little left of the supposedly spontaneous natural moral conduct to emerge once we have purified our character?

1. Krebs, Edward S. Shifu: Soul of Chinese Anarchism, Chapter 7. [↩]
2. ibid., 102. Original Chinese versions from 陈哲夫《现代中国政治思想流派》当代中国出版社 (1999)，vol. 2, p61. [↩]
3. ibid., 103. [↩]