Tag: socialism

A Language for the People: Esperanto and the Defeat of ‘Worldism’ in East Asia

In the early twentieth century, the language of Esperanto found its most vibrant communities not in its European birthplace, but in East Asia. By the 1930s, China and Japan had cultivated Esperanto movements that far surpassed their Western counterparts in both ideological fervour and social reach1. Esperanto is often dismissed as a utopian failure in the face of English’s global ascendency2. However, this dismissal understates the language’s profound historical significance in specific regional contexts. In East Asia, Esperanto was not a practical failure but a potent ideological vehicle manifesting a homegrown philosophy known as ‘worldism’, which envisioned a political order transcending the nation-state system and centring on a global community of ordinary people. This movement represented a direct challenge to the ideological foundations of the Western imperial order.3

 

The appeal of Esperanto in East Asia emerged from a trenchant critique of the prevailing international system.4 As Japan and China grappled with Western imperialism and modernisation, intellectuals such as Japan’s Kōtoku Shūsui and China’s Kang Youwei articulated a powerful alternative. They argued that genuine peace was unattainable within a competitive framework of sovereign nation-states, a system they saw as inherently violent and exploitative. Instead, they envisioned a new global polity built around heimin, or common people. For these thinkers, Esperanto was not conceived as a bolstering international language for state diplomacy, but explicitly as a sōdaidō, a great way of commonality, for grassroots, transnational solidarity.5 This critical distinction framed the language not merely as a tool, but as an act of resistance. For Japanese activists, its adoption was a conscious rejection of their nation’s emulation and participation in a Western-dominated imperial system.

 

This ideological commitment manifested in concrete organisational practices that distinguished East Asian Esperanto movements from their European counterparts. Rapley documents how Japanese Esperantists deliberately targeted working-class communities, establishing study groups in factories, labour unions, and proletarian cultural associations rather than limiting themselves to middle-class intellectual circles as in the European context.6 Chinese Esperantists embedded language instruction within anarchist and socialist organising, treating fluency as both a practical skill for transnational coordination and a symbolic commitment to transcending nationalist ideology.7 This integration of linguistic practice with radical political organising demonstrates that East Asian Esperanto was not simply an educational movement but a form of politics, an attempt to create, in the present, the social relations that activists hoped would characterise a future world order.

 

The movement’s eventual decline illuminates both its achievements and limitations. As Rapley documents, the rise of militaristic nationalism in 1930s Japan systematically suppressed Esperanto organisations, viewing their transnational orientation as incompatible with wartime mobilisation8 . The historical significance extends beyond its practical failure. As Konishi argues, recovering this history challenges teleological narratives that treat the Westphalian system of sovereign nation-states as an inevitable endpoint of political development.9 The Esperantists’ vision of heimin-centred global politics represented a genuinely different path, one that was historically defeated but not intellectually refuted. It reveals that the nation-state order was not an inevitable outcome but one possibility among others, consolidated through specific historical processes that included the violent suppression of alternatives.

  1. Rapley, Ian, ‘A Language for Asia? Transnational Encounters in the Japanese Esperanto Movement, 1906-28’, 2016, 167 [↩]
  2. Boli, John and Thomas, George M., Constructing World Culture: International Non-Governmental Organisations since 1875, (1999), 148 [↩]
  3. Konishi, Sho, ‘Translingual World Order: Language Without Culture in Post-Russo-Japanese War Japan’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 72: 1 (2013), 92 [↩]
  4. Ibid, 99 [↩]
  5. Ibid, 94 [↩]
  6. Rapley, 2016, 169-171 [↩]
  7. Ibid, 173-175 [↩]
  8. Ibid, 177-178 [↩]
  9. Konishi, 2013, pp. 99-100 [↩]

Shifu’s Purist Anarchism: How His Beliefs Separated Him from Other Anarchists

Although Shifu’s introduction to anarchism followed similar paths of his fellow anarchists, his later articulation of a pure anarchist ideology and critiques of various anarchists differentiated him from others.

Born as Liu Shaobin in 1884, Liu grew up in a supportive, prosperous family. His father encouraged progressive ideals, such as educating his daughters and advocating to end foot binding.1 Liu performed well in school, and he eventually went to study abroad in Japan. There, he encountered revolutionary ideas, which served as the preface to many other contemporary anarchists as well. Following this introduction, Liu changed his name to Liu Sifu and joined Sun Yat-Sen’s Revolutionary Alliance, which promoted assassination as a means for reform. After a failed assassination attempt, Liu lost his left hand and was arrested. In prison, Liu’s conceptualizations of anarchism would foster, ultimately leading to his rejection of violence as the path for reform and to the creation of his own understanding of anarchism.2 

In 1912, three years after his release, Liu and three others established the Conscience Society. The twelve points of this society serve as the basis of Liu’s anarchist ideology, which members must follow. Despite the inclusion of a loophole for members to join while not precisely following the twelve points, Liu committed to them fully.3 His change of name to Shifu, rejecting the patriarchal power of a family name, most clearly represents his strict adherence to the points. His refusal to eat meat and ride in rickshas, even in his ailing health, further depicts his devotion. Shifu understood anarchism as a rejection of politics. Politics caused corruption in humanity, and the only way to rid this corruption from society was to take on social revolution. Shifu reasoned that ‘government would be replaced by people’s voluntary self-regulation’, which would depend on people’s management of their consciousness and behavior.4 The problem with society was politics; only with the complete eradication—not a mere replacement—of all forms of government could China be free. And in order to initiate this eradication, one must strictly devote themselves to dismantling the structure which society was built on by holding themselves to these specific standards.

His critique of fellow anarchists illustrates how Shifu’s strict belief in a pure anarchism separated him from other contemporaries. Shifu condemned multiple people for a failure to uphold anarchist ideology, including Zhang Ji and Wu Zhihui of the Paris anarchists and Sun Yat-Sen and Jiang Kanghu of the socialists. For Shifu, to maintain the anarchist ideology, one must reflect on themselves to completely reject the current structure of society: politics. Restructuring is difficult to do, for a complete reimagination of the foundation of society is often impractical. So, many anarchists accepted offices in the new Republican government, such as Zhang Ji and Wu Zhihui, under the pretense that these offices would allow them to strengthen their beliefs through government-backed organizations.5 However, Shifu contended that this acceptance of governmental office fundamentally went against the concept of anarchism and leaders of the Paris anarchists failed to moderate their own behaviors. Thus, Zhang and Wu could no longer be considered anarchists, for they did not align with Shifu’s strict anarchism.

Furthermore, Shifu discredited socialism as anarchism, on the basis of socialism’s narrowness. Shifu’s explanation that socialism concerns only the economy, while anarchism concerns all politics, sets the foundation for his criticism. In this explanation, anarchism is the broader concept which socialism fits under.6 Socialism argues for social policy to economically equalize society, not social revolution and the elimination of politics. Moreover, socialism works within the government to enact these policies; it simply replaces one government with another sympathetic to its ideology. Therefore, socialists should not portray themselves as anarchists, for they do not follow all of the requirements of anarchism. From this separation between socialism and anarchism, Shifu cements his concept of anarchism, which is strictly followed, as true anarchism. Thus, Shifu’s pure anarchism distinguishes Shifu from other contemporary anarchists.

  1. Edward S. Krebs, Shifu, Soul of Chinese Anarchism (Lanham, 1998), p. 2. [↩]
  2. Ibid., p. 7. [↩]
  3. Ibid., p. 115. [↩]
  4. Ibid., p. 119. [↩]
  5. Ibid., p. 121. [↩]
  6. Arif Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution (Berkeley, 1991), p. 142. [↩]