A Pluralist Vision of Society in Defiance of State Power: Guild Socialism in China after the First World War

Abstract

This article explores guild socialism in China after the First World War, arguing that it presented a pluralist vision of the state and society, posing an alternative to the collectivist vision of socialism put forward by the Chinese Communist Party as well as the state-centered notion of politics endorsed by the Chinese Nationalist Party. In an effort to break from the existing scholarly tendency to focus on the theme of state building in the history of Republican China, which tends to restrict the historical meaning of Chinese socialism to national revolution, this article situates interwar Chinese socialisms, including guild socialism, within a global context. It investigates how the Chinese guild socialist Zhang Dongsun and his colleagues formulated their theory in connection to the postwar global trend of criticizing established theories of the state. In so doing, this article will show that Chinese guildsmen attempted to transform socialism into a humanitarian movement, rather than a class revolution, aiming to overcome capitalist alienation and realize freedom as the general principle of human life.