The writer who actually acquainted Pa Chin with anarchism was Emma Goldman. For many years Pa Chin called her his "spiritual mother," and gratefully said of her: "She let me see the beauty of anarchism. The first essay of hers that I read" "completely cleared my blurred eyes." "Her convincing arguments, her clear logic, deeply penetrating vision, rich knowledge, clear and passionate style easily captivated me, a fifteen-year-old boy." For such a boy, craving justice and freedom, the anarchist philosophy and program had a strong appeal. Emma Goldman called it "a philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful as well as unnecessary." By her definition, the goal of anarchism was "the freest possible expression of all the latent powers of an individual...a free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth...an order that will guarantee to every human being an access to and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations."
It was through the influence of Emma Goldman, Kropotkin, and an anarchist group Pa Chin joined almost by chance that his political future was first determined. He said in 1936, "Since I was fifteen I have had a faith and this has guided me through life." He became an anarchist in 1920 and remained a faithful adherent probably until 1949 and certainly through the most creative years of his life when he wrote his novels and his best short stories. Anarchism helped Pa Chin to clarify his outlook on life and put an end to his religious searches. He became a positivist, "knowing only one God - humanity."
Many intellectuals of the older generation, realizing the evils of Chinese life, were inclined to exaggerate the merits of Western ways. Later many of them, like the famous writer and translator of Western social and economic literature Yen Fu, and the political writer and liberal reformist leader Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, grew disappointed with Western culture. Some, including Yen Fu, even began to assert the superiority of the old Chinese learning and political system. Pa Chin avoided these extremes and shifts of opinion. His anarchist teachers gave him no illusions about the West. Thus, for example, Emma Goldman's article on modern drama,2 the translation of which Pa Chin read in New Youth, unfolded before the eyes of the young man in Chengtu a gloomy picture of Western capitalist society as delineated by modern Russian, French, German, Scandinavian, English, and American writers. In vivid summaries of plays by Henrik Ibsen, Hermann Sudermann, Gerhart Hauptmann, Frank Wedekind, and Bernard Shaw, and in poignant remarks about other plays, she showed her readers the hard life of the workers, miscarriages of justice, the economic and moral oppression of women, young lives destroyed by false sexual education, all the hypocrisy and lies on which modern life is based. But Pa Chin's teachers showed him there were people who were willing to fight against the injustices created by capitalism at home and by imperialism abroad. The young man was taught that the main division in the world was along economic and social lines, with the people divided into oppressors and oppressed. He was told, too, that anarchists were the world community that represented the interests of the oppressed. Each national group was fighting for the common ideals in its own country.
Because of his early acceptance of the anarchist outlook on life, Pa Chin was more interested in the fight against the social and economic system of China, which he sometimes called feudalism and sometimes capitalism, than in the fight against foreign imperialism. Only in acute moments of foreign aggression did he take an active part in the anti-imperialist struggle which meant so much to most of his contemporaries.