Ep. 302 | Chinese Anarchists of the Late Qing

The China History Podcast

Laszlo Montgomery

History, Society & Culture

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 12 June 2022

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Thanks to Leigh for the inspiration to cover this sidebar to all the history happening during the end of the Qing and early Republic. This episode examines the lives of these late-Qing intellectuals who went to Paris, Tokyo, and other places to study alternative political systems that might be a good fit for China. Though anarchism works great only in theory, it was still an ideal these intellectuals aspired to. They sought to create a harmonious society where the people weren't persecuted or exploited by an oppressive government. The CCP ended up cherry-picking a few of these ideas that these anarchists wrote about in their journals and publications. These anarchists were the OG's of socialism and communism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome back once again ladies and gentlemen to another edition of the China
0:03.8	History Podcast. Lausel Montgomery here with another little known golden nugget from
0:09.0	the annals of modern Chinese history. Thanks to Lee by the way for pointing me in the direction
0:14.4	of this topic. I was going to do an episode on the Chinese anarchist Lioshir Fu, but decided,
0:22.5	well why not cover the whole broader subject of these groups of intellectuals from the final
0:27.7	years of the Qing Dynasty and their exploration of anarchism as a possible solution to China's
0:34.1	ills during the time they were active in the movement, which was just prior to the fall of the
0:39.5	Qing and the first years of the Republic. Our story today involves about a dozen names, and I'm
0:45.9	guessing other than perhaps, it's higher in pay, not many of them are instantly recognizable.
0:52.4	Like so much of the history that happened in the modern era, our story had its beginnings in
0:58.3	the painful aftermath of the first Sino-Japanese War. 1895 was a year of more national
1:05.7	humiliation in China, after Li Hongjiang inked his name to the Treaty of Shimonoseki.
1:12.1	The ruling class, the intellectuals, those engaged in commerce, they had eaten so many slices of
1:19.8	humble pie since 1842, but this defeat at the hands of the Japanese military was especially painful.
1:28.0	Throughout Chinese imperial history, Japan had always been the little brother to China,
1:32.9	now was China bowing and scraping in front of Japan. With this proverbial final straw,
1:41.0	now more than ever, those whose passions were stirred and who wanted to do something to rejuvenate
1:47.0	the country began taking off and droves to study in Japan, Europe, the US, and elsewhere,
1:55.0	and seek out solutions and new ideas. Following the debacle of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 and
2:02.7	the new realities that came in its wake, even more students sailed to these places to study
2:09.0	and learn what they had been missing out on. At the turn of the century, all these intellectuals,
2:14.9	scholars, students, they did what their most ancient ancestors did back in the Joe dynasty,
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Laszlo Montgomery, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Laszlo Montgomery and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.