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Celebrating the Life of Ba Jin
An Obituary for Emma Goldman's Spiritual Son


Ba Jin's Dreams

Danchen Chen
Excerpt: "Spiritual Mother"1

Of the various new ideologies of the time anarchism influenced Ba Jin most greatly and impressed him most profoundly. He considered this conviction to be his life's faith.

At the beginning of the 20th century, anarchism was introduced, propagated and imported into China via students studying in France and Japan. The Chinese anarchists of this early period, like the famous Liu Shifu and others, opposed the Qing government politically, and intensely opposed traditional Confucian ethics ideologically and culturally. After the 1911 Revolution, people's illusions about a democratic Republic of China were shattered. With the exception of the era's autocratic and despicable warlords, it was comparatively easy for people to accept the demand to abolish every nation, to posit such an extreme political form. Before and after the May 4th Movement many publications of anarchist propaganda appeared, which exerted an especially strong pull on those caught up in the revolutionary upsurge.

Many of the books and periodicals Ba Jin acquired as a youth were anarchist. Kropotkin, author of "An Appeal to the Young," was clearly a representative of anarchism; "Nights Without End" writer Liao Kangfu was also an anarchist; Ibsen was once [perceived as] an intense anarchist. [...] All this is to say that the anarchism of Ba Jin's generation had deep roots. In anarchism Ba Jin saw a bright ideal and a very comprehensible one.

It was in the American Emma Goldman's essay "Anarchism [What It Really Stands For]" that Ba Jin first encountered the theory of anarchism. This article was first translated in the Truth Society's Freedom Papers. In quick succession, New Youth translated Goldman's "The Modern Drama [A Powerful Disseminator of Radical Thought]", "Marriage and Love", and other essays...2

Goldman's essays hit Ba Jin with the impact of a powerful wave, lifting him to a height of passion. It was as if the pitch black world before his eyes receded with the breaking wave of Goldman's thought. The system [Ba Jin had been born into] without doubt denied these traditional [anarchist] ideas. He felt himself completely conquered by Goldman. He said: "It was only at this time that my convictions became clear." He later went so far as to consider her his "spiritual mother," nurturing and guiding him on his life's new path. Such was Goldman's influence that years later, he still sought an opportunity to contact her and enter into a correspondence.



1 Ba Jin de meng: Ba Jin de qianban sheng (Ba Jin's Dreams: The First Half of Ba Jin's Life), Zhongguo Qingnian Chubanshe (China Youth Publishers), Beijing, 1994, 39-40. Translation by Daniel Burton-Rose and Grant Brown.
2 Chen describes Goldman this way: "Goldman was born in Lithuania. In 1886 she immigrated to the United States, where she joined the anarchist movement, as a consequence of which she was incarcerated. Later in America and Europe, she was a traveling lecturer and was present at the following: [1900] in Paris; 1907 at the anarchist conference in Amsterdam; and in 19[3]4 returned to the United States. In her essays Goldman forcefully advocated the use of violence in order to destroy the present social order, abolish government, religion and private property, and advocated individual independence and freedom. She also discussed extensively the emancipation of women and freedom of marriage, considering as she did the institution of marriage as the origin of the loss of women's independence and dignity. For this reason, she preached the necessity of a thoroughgoing abolition of the marriage system so as to achieve a perfect freedom to love between men and women."