Li Shizeng ( zh, t=李石曾, w=Li3 Shih2-tseng1, p=Lǐ Shízēng; 29 May 1881 – 30 September 1973), born Li Yuying, was an educator, promoter of
anarchist doctrines, political activist, and member of the
Chinese Nationalist Party
The Kuomintang (KMT) is a major political party in the Republic of China (Taiwan). It was the sole ruling party of the country during its rule from 1927 to 1949 in Mainland China until its relocation to Taiwan, and in Taiwan ruled under ...
in early
Republican China.
After coming to Paris in 1902, Li took a graduate degree in chemistry and biology, and then along with
Wu Zhihui
Wu Jingheng (), commonly known by his courtesy name Wu Zhihui (Woo Chih-hui, ; 1865–1953), also known as Wu Shi-Fee, was a Chinese linguist and philosopher who was the chairman of the 1912–13 Commission on the Unification of Pronunciatio ...
and
Zhang Renjie, cofounded the
Chinese anarchist movement. He was a supporter of
Sun Yat-sen
Sun Yat-senUsually known as Sun Zhongshan () in Chinese; also known by Names of Sun Yat-sen, several other names. (; 12 November 186612 March 1925) was a Chinese physician, revolutionary, statesman, and political philosopher who founded the Republ ...
. He organized cultural exchange between France and China, established the first factory in Europe to manufacture and sell
beancurd, and created
Diligent Work-Frugal Study programs which brought Chinese students to France for work in factories. In the 1920s, Li, Zhang, Wu, and
Cai Yuanpei were known as the
anti-communist
Anti-communism is political and ideological opposition to communist beliefs, groups, and individuals. Organized anti-communism developed after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia, and it reached global dimensions during the Cold War, when th ...
"Four Elders" of the
Chinese Nationalist Party
The Kuomintang (KMT) is a major political party in the Republic of China (Taiwan). It was the sole ruling party of the country during its rule from 1927 to 1949 in Mainland China until its relocation to Taiwan, and in Taiwan ruled under ...
.
Youth and early career
Though his family was from
Gaoyang County
Gaoyang County () is a county in the central part of Hebei province, People's Republic of China. It is under the jurisdiction of the prefecture-level city of Baoding and has an area of .
The county seat is in Gaoyang Town ().
Administrative di ...
,
Zhili
Zhili, alternately romanized as Chihli, was a northern administrative region of China since the 14th century that lasted through the Ming dynasty and Qing dynasty until 1911, when the region was dissolved, converted to a province, and renamed ...
, Li was brought up in Beijing. His father was
Li Hongzao. Li studied foreign languages. When Li Hongzao died in 1897, the government rewarded his sons with ranks which entitled them to hold middle-level office. The title for this ranking was known as Lung-Chang.
In 1900, the family fled the
Boxer Uprising and
invasion of the Allied Armies. After their return to Beijing, Li attended a banquet at the home of a neighboring high official who had been a friend of his father. There he met
Zhang Renjie, the son of a prosperous Zhejiang silk merchant whose family had purchased him a degree and who had come to the capital to arrange a suitable office. The two quickly discovered that they shared same ideas for the reform of Chinese government and society, beginning a friendship which lasted the rest of their lives. When Li was chosen in 1903 as an "embassy student" to accompany China's new ambassador
Sun Baoqi to Paris, Zhang had his family arrange for him to join the group as a commercial attache. Li and Zhang traveled together, stopping first in Shanghai to meet with
Wu Zhihui
Wu Jingheng (), commonly known by his courtesy name Wu Zhihui (Woo Chih-hui, ; 1865–1953), also known as Wu Shi-Fee, was a Chinese linguist and philosopher who was the chairman of the 1912–13 Commission on the Unification of Pronunciatio ...
, by then a famous radical critic of the Qing government, where they also met Wu's friend,
Cai Yuanpei.
Anarchism and France
At the time, since France had the reputation of being the home of revolution, Chinese officials were reluctant to sponsor study there. Li and Zhang, however, were well connected, and arrived in France, December 1902, accompanied by their wives. Ambassador Sun was indulgent and allowed Li to spend his time in intense French language study, but Li soon resigned from the embassy to enroll in a graduate program in chemistry and biology at in
Montargis, a suburb south of Paris. In three years he earned his degree, then went to Paris for further study at the
Sorbonne University
Sorbonne University () is a public research university located in Paris, France. The institution's legacy reaches back to the Middle Ages in 1257 when Sorbonne College was established by Robert de Sorbon as a constituent college of the Unive ...
and the
Pasteur Institute
The Pasteur Institute (, ) is a French non-profit private foundation dedicated to the study of biology, micro-organisms, diseases, and vaccines. It is named after Louis Pasteur, who invented pasteurization and vaccines for anthrax and rabies. Th ...
. He announced that he would break with family tradition and would not pursue an official career. Zhang, meanwhile, began to make his fortune by starting a Paris company to import Chinese decorative art and curios. Li and Zhang persuaded Wu Zhihui to come to Paris from Edinburgh, where he had been attending university lectures. Li, Zhang, and Wu did not forget their revolutionary goals. On route back to China for a visit, Zhang met the anti-Manchu revolutionary,
Sun Yat-sen
Sun Yat-senUsually known as Sun Zhongshan () in Chinese; also known by Names of Sun Yat-sen, several other names. (; 12 November 186612 March 1925) was a Chinese physician, revolutionary, statesman, and political philosopher who founded the Republ ...
and promised him extensive financial support. On his return to Paris in 1907, Zhang led Li and Wu to join Sun's
Tongmenghui
The Tongmenghui of China was a secret society and underground resistance movement founded by Sun Yat-sen, Song Jiaoren, and others in Tokyo, Empire of Japan, on 20 August 1905, with the goal of overthrowing China's Qing dynasty. It was formed ...
(Chinese Revolutionary Alliance).
The Paris Anarchists

The three young radicals had come in search of ideas to explain their world and of ways to change it. They soon discovered the fashionable doctrines of anarchism, which they saw as a scientific and cosmopolitan set of ideas which would bring progress to China. The key point of difference with other revolutionaries was that for them political revolution was meaningless without cultural change. A group of Chinese anarchists in Tokyo, led by
Liu Shipei, favored a return to the individualist Daoism of ancient China which found government irrelevant, but for the Paris anarchists, as the historian Peter Zarrow puts it, "science was truth and truth was science." In the following years they helped anarchism to become a pervasive, perhaps dominant, strand among radical young Chinese.
The Paris anarchists argued that China needed to abolish Confucian family structure, liberate women, promote moral personal behavior, and create equitable social organizations. Li wrote that "family revolution, revolution against the sages, revolution in the Three Bonds and the
Five Constants would advance the cause of humanitarianism." Once these goals had been accomplished, they reasoned, the minds of the people would be clear and political improvement would follow. Authoritarian government would then be unnecessary.
Although these anarchists sought to overthrow Confucian orthodoxy, their assumptions resonated with the idealistic assumptions of
Neo-Confucianism
Neo-Confucianism (, often shortened to ''lǐxué'' 理學, literally "School of Principle") is a moral, ethical, and metaphysical Chinese philosophy influenced by Confucianism, which originated with Han Yu (768–824) and Li Ao (772–841) i ...
: that human nature is basically good; that humans do not need coercion or governments to force them to be decent to each other; and that moral self-cultivation would lead individuals to fulfill themselves within society, rather than by liberating themselves from it. For these anarchists, as for late imperial Neo-Confucians, schools were a non-authoritarian instrument of personal transformation and their favored role was as teacher.

In 1906 Zhang, Li, and Wu founded the Chinese anarchist organization, the World Society (世界社 ''Shijie she''), sometimes translated as New World Society. In later years, before moving to Taiwan in 1949, the Society became a powerful financial conglomerate, but in its early phase focused on programs of education and radical change.
In 1908, the World Society started a weekly journal, ''
Xin Shiji'' 新世紀週報 (New Era or New Century; titled ''La Novaj Tempoj'' in Esperanto), to introduce Chinese students in France, Japan, and China to the history of European radicalism. Zhang's successful enterprise selling Chinese art funded the journal, Wu edited it, and Li was the major contributor. Other contributors included
Wang Jingwei
Wang Zhaoming (4 May 188310 November 1944), widely known by his pen name Wang Jingwei, was a Chinese politician who was president of the Reorganized National Government of the Republic of China, a puppet state of the Empire of Japan. He was in ...
,
Zhang Ji, and
Chu Minyi, a student from Zhejiang who accompanied Zhang Renjie back from China and would be his assistant in the years to come.
Li eagerly read and translated essays by
William Godwin
William Godwin (3 March 1756 – 7 April 1836) was an English journalist, political philosopher and novelist. He is considered one of the first exponents of utilitarianism and the first modern proponent of anarchism. Godwin is most famous fo ...
,
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (, ; ; 1809 – 19 January 1865) was a French anarchist, socialist, philosopher, and economist who founded mutualist philosophy and is considered by many to be the "father of anarchism". He was the first person to ca ...
,
Élisée Reclus, and the anarchist classics of
Peter Kropotkin
Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin (9 December 1842 – 8 February 1921) was a Russian anarchist and geographer known as a proponent of anarchist communism.
Born into an aristocratic land-owning family, Kropotkin attended the Page Corps and later s ...
, especially ''
The Conquest of Bread'' and ''
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution''. Li was struck by their arguments that cooperation and mutual aid were more powerful than the
Social Darwinist forces of competition or heartless survival of the fittest. Li was also impressed by conversations with the Kropotkinist writer
Jean Grave, who had spent two years in prison for publishing "Society on the Brink of Death" (1892) an anarchist pamphlet.
Progress was the legitimizing principle. Li wrote in 1907 that
:Progress is advance without stopping, transformation without end. There is no affair or thing that does not progress. That is the nature of evolution. That which does not progress or is tardy owes it to sickness in human beings and injury in other things. That which does away with sickness and injury is none other than revolution. Revolution is nothing but cleansing away obstacles to progress.
The Paris group worked on the assumption that science and rationality would lead toward a world civilization in which China would participate on an equal basis. They espoused
Esperanto
Esperanto (, ) is the world's most widely spoken Constructed language, constructed international auxiliary language. Created by L. L. Zamenhof in 1887 to be 'the International Language' (), it is intended to be a universal second language for ...
, for instance, as a scientifically designed language which would lead toward a single global language superior to national ones. Their faith in moral self-cultivation led Li to adopt
vegetarianism
Vegetarianism is the practice of abstaining from the Eating, consumption of meat (red meat, poultry, seafood, insects as food, insects, and the flesh of any other animal). It may also include abstaining from eating all by-products of animal slau ...
in 1908, a lifelong commitment. Yet he also believed that individuals could not liberate themselves simply by their own will, but needed strong moral examples of teachers.
''Xin Shijie'' even called for the reform of Chinese theater. Li regretted that reform had stopped at halfway measures such as introducing gas lights. He called for deeper reforms such as stage sets rather than bare stage and allowing men and women to act on the same stage. Li consulted several French friends before deciding to translate two contemporary French plays, ''L'Echelle'', a one-act play by
Edouard Norès (?-1904), which he translated as ''Ming bu ping'', and ''Le Grand Soir'' by
Leopold Kampf (1881–1913), which he translated as ''Ye wei yang''.
By 1910, Zhang Renjie, who continued to travel back and forth to China to promote business and support revolution, could no longer finance both Sun Yat-sen and the journal, which ceased publication after 121 issues.
Soy factory and Work-Study program
The anarchists Li and Zhang Renjie also owned businesses to finance their political activities. As Zhang expanded his import business, Li realized that he could put his scientific training to use in manufacturing soy products. He felt that
beancurd ''(doufu)'', would appeal to the French public as characteristically Chinese.

In 1908 Li opened a soy factory, the
Usine de la Caséo-Sojaïne, which manufactured and sold ''
doufu'' (beancurd).
The plant, housed in a brick building at 46–48 Rue Denis Papin in the suburb of
La Garenne-Colombes
La Garenne-Colombes () is a Communes of France, commune in the northwestern suburbs of Paris, France. It is located from Notre Dame de Paris, France's kilometre zero.
Name
The commune used to be part of the neighbouring city of Colombes. At t ...
a few miles to the north of Paris, produced a variety of soy products. There was little market for bean-curd jam, soy coffee and chocolate, eggs, or bean-curd cheese (in Gruyere, Roquefort or Camembert flavors), but soy flour and biscuits sold well. The company offered free meals to Chinese students, who gathered also to discuss and debate revolutionary strategy. Sun Yat-sen visited the factory in 1909, and wrote: "My friend Li Shizeng has conducted research on soybeans and advocates eating soybean foods instead of meat."
Li planned the Work-Study program as a way to bring young Chinese to France whose study would be financed by working in the beancurd factory and whose character would be uplifted by a regimen of moral instruction. This first Work-Study program eventually brought 120 workers to France. Li aimed to take these worker-students, who he called "ignorant" and "superstitious", and make them into knowledgeable and moral citizens who on their return would become models for a new China. The program instructed them in Chinese, French, and science and required them to abstain from tobacco, alcohol, and gambling.
Li returned to China in 1909 to raise further capital for the factory. Again using family connections, he secured an interview with the governor of Zhili, Yang Lianpu, a friend of his father's, and secured a contribution. His father-in-law, Yao Xueyuan (1843–1914), head of the salt merchants of Tianjin, solicited the national community of
salt merchants for investment. . In six months Li raised some $400,000. He arrived back in France with five workers (all from Gaoyang, his home district), and a supply of soybeans and coagulant.
France
In 1905, while he was still a graduate student, Li presented his first paper on soy at the Second International Dairy Congress in Paris, and published it in the proceedings of the conference. In 1910 he published a short treatise in Chinese on the economic and health benefits of soy beans and soy products, especially ''doufu'', which he maintained could alleviate diabetes and arthritic pain, and then in 1912 ''Le Soja'' in French. At the annual lunch of France's Society for Acclimatization (''Société d'Acclimatation''), in keeping with its tradition of introducing new foods from little-known plants, Li served a meal of vegetarian ham (''jambon végétal''), soy cheese (''fromage de Soya''), soy preserves (''confitures de Soya'', such as ''crème de marron''), and soy bread (''pain de Soya'').
Together with his partner L. Grandvoinnet, in 1912 Li published a 150-page pamphlet containing their series of eight earlier articles: ''Le soja: sa culture, ses usages alimentaires, thérapeutiques, agricoles et industriels'' (Soya – Its Cultivation, Dietary, Therapeutic, Agricultural and Industrial Uses; Paris: A Challamel, 1912). The soy historians William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi call it "one of the earliest, most important, influential, creative, interesting, and carefully researched books ever written about soybeans and soyfoods. Its bibliography on soy is larger than any published prior to that time."
Li and the factory engineers developed and patented equipment for producing soymilk and beancurd, including the world's first soymilk patents. Shurtleff and Aoyagi comment that their 1912 patent was "packed with original ideas, including various French-style cheeses and the world's first industrial soy protein isolate, called Sojalithe, after its counterpart, Galalith, made from milk protein." Li claimed that Sojalithe could also be used as a substitute for ivory.
Xinhai revolution

On the eve of the
Xinhai revolution
The 1911 Revolution, also known as the Xinhai Revolution or Hsinhai Revolution, ended China's last imperial dynasty, the Qing dynasty, and led to the establishment of the Republic of China (ROC). The revolution was the culmination of a decade ...
, Li joined Zhang Renjie in Beijing (they may have taken part in a plot to assassinate
Yuan Shikai
Yuan Shikai (; 16 September 18596 June 1916) was a Chinese general and statesman who served as the second provisional president and the first official president of the Republic of China, head of the Beiyang government from 1912 to 1916 and ...
, who had edged out Sun Yat-sen from the presidency of the new republic). Wu Zhihui borrowed money from Sun to join them and other of the Paris anarchists such as Zhang Ji.
Wang Jingwei
Wang Zhaoming (4 May 188310 November 1944), widely known by his pen name Wang Jingwei, was a Chinese politician who was president of the Reorganized National Government of the Republic of China, a puppet state of the Empire of Japan. He was in ...
, who had been jailed for an assassination attempt on a Manchu governor in 1910, was freed by the new government. These anarchists took advantage of the new political openness to practice what one historian calls "applied anarchism".
Soon after their return, the group organized The Society to Advance Morality (進德會 ''Jinde hui''), also known as the "Eight Nots", or "Eight Prohibitions Society" (八不會 ''Babu hui''). True to its anarchist principles, the Society had no president, no officers, no regulations or means to enforce them, and no dues or fines. Each level of membership, however, had increasingly rigorous requirements. "Supporting members", the lowest level, agreed not to visit prostitutes and not to gamble. "General members" agreed in addition not to take concubines. The next higher level further agreed not to take government office—"Someone has to watch over officials"—not to become members of parliament, and not to smoke. The highest level promised in addition to abstain from alcohol and meat. These moral principles had a wide appeal among the new intelligentsia which was forming in cities and universities, but Li, in light of the Society's prohibition on holding office, turned down Sun Yat-sen's request that he join the new government, as did Wang Jingwei.
Diligent Work-Frugal Study Movement
In April 1912, still excited by the prospect of the new-born
Chinese Republic, Li, Zhang Renjie, Wu Zhihui, and Cai Yuanpei founded in Beijing the Association for Frugal Study in France (留法儉學會 ''Liufa jianxue hui''), also known as the Society for Rational French Education (''la Societé Rationelle des Etudiants Chinois en France''). At that time, most students who went abroad went on government scholarships to Japan, though the
Chinese Educational Mission of 1872-1881 and the
Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program
The Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program was a scholarship program for Chinese students to be educated in the United States, funded by the Boxer Indemnities. On May 25, 1908, the U.S. Congress Senate and House of Representatives passed the Joint ...
sent students to the United States. In contrast to his own experience on the 1902 program as an "embassy scholar", which involved only a handful of students from privileged families, Li hoped to welcome hundreds of working-class students into his program. For Li, work-study continued to have a moral as well as an educational function. In addition to making workers more knowledgeable, work-study would eliminate their "decadent habits" and transform them into morally upright and hard-working citizens
Yuan Shikai's opposition closed the program down. In September 1913, after Yuan violently suppressed Sun's "
second revolution", Li and Wang Jingwei took their families to France for safety. Wang lived with Li in Montargis and lectured to the Work-Study students. The bean-curd factory began to do better. Over the first five years, bean-curd sales averaged only 500 pieces (cakes) per month but increased to 10,000 a month in 1915, sometimes to more than 17,000 pieces a month. In 1916, however, wartime conditions forced the factory to close (it re-opened in 1919, when post-war milk shortages made soy milk more attractive).

The outbreak of war in Europe in 1914 led the French government to recruit Chinese workers for their factories. By the end of the war, the
Chinese Labor Corps in France brought more than 130,000 workers, mostly from North China villages. In June 1915, Li and his friends in Paris took advantage of this opportunity to provide schooling and training for those working in French factories. They renewed the Work-Study program, though on a different basis, involving less educated workers rather than students. By March 1916 their Paris group, the Societe Franco-Chinoise d'Education (華法教育會 ''Hua-Fa jiaoyuhui'') was directly involved in recruiting and training these workers. They pressed the French government to give the workers technical education as well as factory work, and Li wrote extensively in the ''Chinese Labor Journal'' (''Huagong zazhi''), which introduced Western science, the arts, fiction, and current events.
In 1921, after Li had returned to China, leaders of riots in Lyons against the leadership of the program were expelled from the country. The younger generation of students then became angry critics who dismissed anarchism and rejected older leaders. The Sino-French Institute did not become central to
Sino-French relations.
Nationalist Party and anarchism in the 1920s
In 1919 Li returned to Beijing to accept Cai Yuanpei's offer to teach science at the forward-looking
Peking University
Peking University (PKU) is a Public university, public Types of universities and colleges in China#By designated academic emphasis, university in Haidian, Beijing, China. It is affiliated with and funded by the Ministry of Education of the Peop ...
and to also become president of the Sino-French University just outside the city.
Although the basic slogan of the
New Culture Movement
The New Culture Movement was a progressivism, progressive sociopolitical movement in China during the 1910s and 1920s. Participants criticized many aspects of traditional Chinese society, in favor of new formulations of Chinese culture inform ...
was "Science and Democracy", Li was one of the few influential intellectuals to have professional training in a hard science. In keeping with
anarchist opposition to religion, Li continued to use science to attack religion as superstition. When he became president of the Anti-Christian Movement of 1922 Li told the Beijing Atheists' League: "Religion is intrinsically old and corrupt: history has passed it by." He went on to make clear that as a cosmopolitan he did not oppose Christianity because it was foreign, but all religion as such:
:Why are we of the twentieth century... even debating this nonsense from primitive ages? ... As Western scholars often say, "Science and religion advance and retreat in reverse proportion"... Morality is the natural power for goodness. Religious morality, on the other hand, really works by rewards and punishment; it is the opposite of true morality.... The basic nature of all living creatures, including the human race, not only nourishes self-interest but also unfolds as support of the group. This is the root of morality.
The former Paris Anarchists became a force in Sun Yat-sen's Nationalist Party as it rose to national power in the early 1920s. Zhang Renjie's Shanghai stock-market earnings made him a major financial supporter of the party and an early patron of
Chiang Kai-shek. After Sun's death in 1925 and the initial success of Chiang's
Northern Expedition
The Northern Expedition was a military campaign launched by the National Revolutionary Army (NRA) of the Kuomintang (KMT) against the Beiyang government and other regional warlords in 1926. The purpose of the campaign was to reunify China prop ...
, the Nationalists
split into left and right factions. In 1927, Li Shizeng, Wu Zhihui, Cai Yuanpei, and Zhang Renjie became known as the party's Four Elders (''yuan lao''). As members of the Central Supervisory Committee in April 1927 they strongly supported
Chiang Kai-shek over the leftist
Wuhan government headed by their old colleague, Wang Jingwei, and they cheered the expulsion of all
Communists
Communism () is a sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology within the socialist movement, whose goal is the creation of a communist society, a socioeconomic order centered on common ownership of the means of production, d ...
and the
bloody suppression of the communists and the left in Shanghai.
The Four Elders had never established an independent power base within the party but relied on their personal relations, first with Sun, then with Chiang Kai-shek, in their efforts to make the Nationalist Party the instrument for their anarchist ambitions. In 1927, Li and Wu Zhihui were appointed as Chairmen of the Party, Cai Yuanpei accepted a series of offices in the
new government, and Zhang Renjie was one of the powers behind Chiang's takeover after Sun's death. They encouraged their young anarchist followers to join the party, organize labor, and work for revolution. Many of these young anarchists did so but others sharply pointed out that Li had originally made the renunciation of political office a key principle; the defining goal of anarchism was to overthrow the state not join it. One critic wrote that "the moment Li and Wu entered the Guomindang they as good as stopped being anarchists."
The Labor University, Palace Museum, and French university
Li indeed had on principle refused government office but he did accept cultural positions. In November 1924,
Feng Yuxiang
Feng Yuxiang (; ; 6 November 1882 – 1 September 1948), courtesy name Huanzhang (焕章), was a Chinese warlord and later general in the National Revolutionary Army. He served as Vice Premier of the Republic of China from 1928 to 1930.
A ...
, the Nationalists' rival, captured Beijing and evicted the
former emperor,
Puyi
Puyi (7 February 190617 October 1967) was the final emperor of China, reigning as the eleventh monarch of the Qing dynasty from 1908 to 1912. When the Guangxu Emperor died without an heir, Empress Dowager Cixi picked his nephew Puyi, aged tw ...
, from the
Forbidden City
The Forbidden City () is the Chinese Empire, imperial Chinese palace, palace complex in the center of the Imperial City, Beijing, Imperial City in Beijing, China. It was the residence of 24 Ming dynasty, Ming and Qing dynasty, Qing dynasty L ...
. When the
Palace Museum was set up to oversee the vast art collections left by the emperors, Li was appointed Director General, and his protégé and distant relative
Yi Peiji was made curator. Deciding the disposition and even the ownership of these former imperial treasures was a challenge since many had already been sold by the eunuchs or impoverished imperial household staff. By the mid-1920s, many intellectuals and nationalists had come to recognize and strongly oppose the depredation of China's artistic heritage and the export of art by Chinese and foreign dealers. Therefore, the handling of the imperial collections in the Forbidden City was both a cultural and a political problem. The Palace Museum was opened on October 10, 1925, the anniversary of the Republican revolution. Li was forced to flee in fear for his life in 1926 when he was accused of communist sympathies but returned when KMT troops took the city in June 1928. Li served as chair of the Board of Directors until 1932 and also became sponsor of the
Academia Sinica
Academia Sinica (AS, ; zh, t=中央研究院) is the national academy of the Taiwan, Republic of China. It is headquartered in Nangang District, Taipei, Nangang, Taipei.
Founded in Nanjing, the academy supports research activities in mathemat ...
.
In 1927, following
bloody suppression of the communists and the left in April, Li gained preliminary support for a
National Labor University (Laodong Daxue) in Shanghai. The National Labor University was to be the cornerstone of anarchism and the training ground for new leaders who would rise within the GMD. Drawing on the anarchist Work-Study experience in Europe, Li's aim was to produce a labor-intellectual who would embody the fusion in school slogan: "turn schools into fields and factories, fields and factories into schools."
Yet the result was mixed. The GMD Central Political Council approved the proposal in May and the university opened in September. Two factories had been set up by the Shanghai municipal government several years earlier, one for juvenile delinquents and homeless youth and another to provide jobs for the urban poor, but they had been shut down when the Chiang's troops took the city, leaving six-hundred young workers with no work. The new university re-opened these factories and welcomed workers and peasants to attend classes free of charge. Li, Cai Yuanpei, Zhang Renjie, Chu Minyi and seven others were appointed to the Board, and Yi Peiji, who had fled Beijing with Li, became president.
The Charter for the university announced that its mission was to be the "educational organ of the laborers," and that it would be an "experiment in social-welfare and conduct surveys into working conditions." The Charter continued that students would be sent to factories and fields to "cultivate manual skills and to learn to respect hard work." That is, as one historian observes, the school was based on the assumption that "revolution should be contained in an evolutionary process" and that the goal was "cultivating personal revolutionary virtues," not social or political revolution. Even if Li had intended the school to be a revolutionary training ground, in the anti-leftist atmosphere the actual practice of the university was limited and subdued. The university was closed down in 1932.
For many years Li had used his connections in France and China to build cultural relations. In 1917 Li had first urged France to return her portion of the
Boxer Indemnity Fund to be used for cultural activities and educational exchange. In 1925, after long negotiations, the two governments signed an agreement. The money was funneled through Li, ensuring him a role of power for the next several decades. He may well have devoted a portion of it, together with money from his family, to support his own projects. Chief among these projects was the Sino-French University in Beijing, which Li had started in 1920 as a counterpart to the Sino-French University in Lyon, also started in 1920. The Sino-French University in Beijing at one point was so well-funded that it gave Peking University substantial help in repaying its debts.
In 1927 the new
nationalist government
The Nationalist government, officially the National Government of the Republic of China, refers to the government of the Republic of China (1912–1949), Republic of China from 1 July 1925 to 20 May 1948, led by the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT ...
appointed Cai Yuanpei head of a board of universities which would replace the ministry of education. Li and Cai had been impressed with the rational organization of the French system of higher education in which, instead of random groupings, the country was divided into regional districts which did not overlap or duplicate each other's missions. Peking University was renamed Beiping University and reorganized to absorb other local universities. In 1928, Cai made Li head of the district for Beiping, but there was general resistance to the new scheme and the two old friends had a falling out. The new system was abandoned.
By 1929 the anarchist attempt to prosper within the GMD reached a dead end. The Labor University, conclude historians Ming Chan and
Arif Dirlik, added another dimension and constituency to the ideal of labor-learning which Li and the Paris anarchists had introduced into the revolutionary discourse, but they argue that by the 1920s the concept had been adopted by a wide range of revolutionaries, including their rivals, the Marxists. The Four Elders had relied on personal relations with Chiang Kai-shek but lost traction when Chiang shifted his support to other factions, as Chiang often did when one faction became too strong. Dirlik also suggests that activist Chinese now felt, fairly or not, that the anarchist agenda was theoretical and long term, so could not compete with Communist or Nationalist programs of immediate and strong organization needed to save China. Li continued to work and write freely, but many of his activist followers were suppressed or put in jail.
Later years
Accusations about the handling of Palace Museum finances began to dog Li and his protégé, Yi Peiji. To pay for ambitious cataloging and publication projects Yi had sold off gold dust, silver, silk, and clothing without government approval. In October 1933, after several years of investigations which Li had fought, a procurator brought formal charges against both men, with another round of indictments a year later and further charges against Yi in 1937. Yi fled to the Japanese concession at
Tientsin and Li could move about in Shanghai and other coastal concessions only in disguise.
In 1932, Li traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, to organize the Chinese delegation to the
International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation
The International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, sometimes League of Nations Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, is an advisory organisation for the League of Nations which promotes international exchange between scientists, researche ...
of the
League of Nations
The League of Nations (LN or LoN; , SdN) was the first worldwide intergovernmental organisation whose principal mission was to maintain world peace. It was founded on 10 January 1920 by the Paris Peace Conference (1919–1920), Paris Peace ...
. While at Geneva he established the
Sino-International Library.
During
World War II
World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...
, Li lived for most of the time in New York, with trips to Chongqing and Kunming. After the 1941 death of his first wife in Paris, he was reported to have a relation with a Jewish woman named "Ru Su" ("Mrs. Vegetarian"?), but they did not marry. He served as a cochairman of the
Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, an offshoot of the
Bergson Group, which lobbied the US government and took out advertisements in newspapers urging American intervention to save European Jews. In 1943 and 1944 he was a featured speaker at the committee's Emergency Conferences to Save the Jewish People of Europe.
Following the war, Li returned once again to China. As Rector of the National Peiping Research Academy Li was a delegate to the First Soya Congress in Paris, March 1947. The Congress was organized by the French Bureau of Soya (''Bureau Français du Soya''), the Laboratory of Soya Experiments (''Laboratoire dEssais du Soya''), and the France-China Association (''lAssociation France-Chine''). As communist armies
approached Beijing in 1948, Li moved to Geneva, where he and his wife remained until 1950, when Switzerland extended recognition to the People's Republic. He then moved to
Montevideo
Montevideo (, ; ) is the capital city, capital and List of cities in Uruguay, largest city of Uruguay. According to the 2023 census, the city proper has a population of 1,302,954 (about 37.2% of the country's total population) in an area of . M ...
,
Uruguay
Uruguay, officially the Oriental Republic of Uruguay, is a country in South America. It shares borders with Argentina to its west and southwest and Brazil to its north and northeast, while bordering the Río de la Plata to the south and the A ...
. After his wife died there in 1954, Li established a second home in KMT-controlled Taiwan and resumed his role as national policy advisor to Chiang Kai-shek and a member of the Central Appraisal Committee, which superseded the Central Supervisory Committee.
In 1958, one of Li's last public acts was to dedicate a middle-school in
Tainan
Tainan (), officially Tainan City, is a Special municipality (Taiwan), special municipality in southern Taiwan, facing the Taiwan Strait on its western coast. Tainan is the oldest city on the island and commonly called the "Taiwan Prefecture, ...
named in honor of Wu Zhihui.
私立稚暉初級中學創始人 教育部中部辦公室
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Li died in Taipei on September 30, 1973, at the age of 92. He was given a large funeral ceremony and buried there.
Family and personal life
In 1897, at the age of 17, Li married Yao Tongyi, his older cousin, who died in Paris in 1941. They had two children: Li Zongwei, a son born in 1899 in China, who married Ji Xiengzhan and had three children, Aline, Tayang and Eryang, and died in 1976; and Li Yamei (called "Micheline"), a daughter born in 1910 in Paris, who married Zhu Guangcai and had three children, Zhu Minyan, Zhu Minda, and Zhu Minxing.
In 1943, Li met a Mrs. "Ru Su", who is described as a Jewish woman who lived in New York. She became his partner but they did not marry.
On February 14, 1946, Li married Lin Sushan in Shanghai. She died in Montevideo in 1954.
In 1957, Li married for the third time, to Tian Baotian in Taipei, when he was 76 and she was 42.
Major works
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* Biblioteca Sino-Internacional (Montevideo, Uruguay), 黄淵泉, 國立中央圖書館, 中國國際圖書館中文舊籍目錄, 國立中央圖書館, 1984
* Zhongguo wuzhengfu zhuyi he Zhongguo shehuidang hinese Anarchism and the Chinese Socialist Party Nanjing: Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 1981.
Notes
References and further reading
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* , esp. Ch. 6, "The Work-Study Movement."
* "Li Shih-tseng", in .
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* At The Anarchist Library
Free Download
. The online version is unpaginated.
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External links
Estel negre Ateneu Libertari
* Daniel Cairns,
Li Shizeng
annaqi
L'Institut Franco-Chinois
Zheng Yuxiu with Li ShizhenFu Binchang CollectionHistorical Photographs of China
{{DEFAULTSORT:Li, Shizeng
1881 births
1973 deaths
Academic staff of Peking University
Chinese anarchists
Chinese anti-communists
Chinese atheists
Chinese Esperantists
Chinese expatriates in France
Chinese Nationalists
Educators from Hebei
Members of the Kuomintang
Presidents of Beijing Normal University
Soy researchers
Taiwanese people from Beijing
Tongmenghui members