The man's name is rarely mentioned now, but it is unavoidable in the history of Chinese thought. Born in 1883 in Yiyang, Jiangxi Province, he was the leader of the Chinese Socialist Party and a famous scholar.
Jiang Kanghu
In his early years, Jiang Kanghu studied Japanese at the Tongwen Academy in Beijing, and in the spring of 1901, he traveled to Japan to study Japanese politics. After returning to China, he was hired by Yuan Shikai as the general office of the Beiyang Compilation Bureau, responsible for compiling textbooks for primary and secondary schools in the five provinces of North China, and concurrently serving as the editor-in-chief of the Beiyang Official Daily. In the following year, Jiang Kanghu traveled east to Japan, and after returning to China, he served as the chief of the Punishment Department and the Japanese teacher of the Kyoshi University Hall (the predecessor of Peking University). At the same time, four women's schools for training teachers were established in Beijing. In 1907, Jiang Kanghu went to Japan for the third time, studied English, French and German at the same time, and began to contact the theory of "socialism". In 1910, he traveled to Europe to preach anarchism, that is, the "three noes" (no religion, no state, no family).
After returning to China, in July 1911, Jiang Kanghu established the "Socialist Research Society" in Shanghai to promote socialism. The concept of "socialism" was first proposed in China. After the Xinhai Revolution, it was reorganized into the Chinese Socialist Party. This is the first political party in China's modern history. The Socialist Party takes freedom of love, equality in education, and attribution of inheritance as its primary goals; its goal is to do its best, to take what it needs, and to take what it needs, and non-private property, non-family, non-religion, non-militarism, and non-fatherlandism; and to take individual autonomy and world unity as the ultimate goal.
Although the social influence of the Socialist Party at that time was not very large, and at most it only grew to more than 20,000 party members, but most of its party members later became elite figures in China, such as Li Dazhao, Ye Shengtao, Gu Jiegang, Wang Boxiang and so on. Snow, a Western journalist who wrote "Journey to the West" decades later, once said that he mentioned a person in a conversation with Mao Zedong, and it was this person who first gave Mao Zedong a slow understanding of what "socialism" was. This person is Jiang Kanghu.
Therefore, the Socialist Party, although from the very beginning, was destined to be a political product that transcended the times. However, it was the first organization to bring enlightenment ideas to China, and in that political pattern in which the masses stood side by side, in the political arena at the end of the Qing Dynasty and the beginning of the People's Republic, various ideological trends and political figures of various factions appeared one after another, and China ushered in an unprecedented period of ideological activity. This is the ideological brewing period of great changes in China. Authoritarian empires and imperial power began to be challenged as never before.
Jiang Kanghu calligraphy
However, although Jiang Kanghu agreed with the republic, he openly criticized and blamed the Xinhai Revolution. In June 1912, Jiang Kanghu went to Beijing and met yuan shikai several times to expound his socialist views. It put forward eight party programs, including approval of the republic, respect for human rights, equality in education, inheritance attribution, reform of the tax system, restriction of armaments, and development of public utilities. It is hoped that Yuan Shikai will practice National Socialism. In order to be loyal to Yuan Shikai, the Jiang Kang Tiger Federation and the Chambers of Commerce of various countries, the Education Association, opposed Sun Yat-sen's armed resistance to Yuan. After the outbreak of the "Second Revolution", perhaps Jiang Kanghu's ideas were too idealistic and were snubbed by Yuan Shikai. His Socialist Party was also banned, and Jiang Kanghu went abroad to hide. He was hired as a lecturer in Chinese culture at the University of California. He later chaired the Eastern Division of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. In 1921, Jiang Kanghu returned to China to actively contact the old ministry and once again formed the Chinese Socialist Party. However, with the outbreak of Japan's invasion of China, Jiang Kanghu himself also served as a state councilor and examination director of the Wang puppet regime during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression. After the end of the Anti-Japanese War, he was sentenced to life imprisonment as a traitor and died in Shanghai Tilanqiao Prison in 1954.