From Anarchist High School to Vocational College: Patronage, History, and Remembrance at Quanzhou’s Liming Vocational College
Tuesday, July 30, 2024
14:00 – 15:45 (GMT+7)
Paper Abstract: From 1927 to 1934, Liming Advanced Middle School and Pingmin Middle School operated as anarchist-inspired and -run schools in the southeastern port city of Quanzhou, Fujian.The history of these two schools, their anarchist identities, and their later revival as Liming Vocational College have long been tied to the patronage of famed author, Ba Jin.While Ba Jin visited the schools three times in the late 1920s and early 1930s, befriended many of the schools’ faculty, and wrote of his experiences there, both sites also maintained deep connections to Fujian’s large overseas communities as well as groups of Korean anarchists-in-exile.Examining these connections beyond Ba Jin reveals the schools’ broad and complex place in transnational radical networks and demonstrates not only the continued vitality of anarchist organizing in China into the 1930s, but also the ways in which anarchists and other radicals continued to mine global connections to build their own dreams of possible revolution.Moreover, Liming and Pingmin’s initial life as radical experiments in education, their overseas Chinese connections, their subsequent rebirth as a vocational college, and the college’s current celebration of its links to Ba Jin all showcase how hidden radical pasts are transformed into feted local histories.
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