Early life '' He was born in
Yiyang,
Jiangxi,
China. Jiang, whose reading abilities included Japanese, English, French, and German, learned and began to develop a passion for
socialism and
anarchism while studying and traveling in Europe and Japan. In 1909 he attended the congress of the
Second International in
Brussels. On his return to China, he served as educational adviser to
Yuan Shikai.
Early political and literary activities Jiang served briefly as a professor at
Peking University, but was ousted from that position on the grounds of his ideological radicalism. In August 1911, shortly after losing his post at Peking University, Jiang Kanghu established the Association for Socialism, and in November renamed it the Socialist Party of China. While teaching at Berkeley, Jiang met a fellow faculty member,
Witter Bynner, and the two struck up a long lasting friendship based on their love of poetry. Bynner later recalled him as a "gentle scholar" and a "man of principle and brave action." Jiang's off-handed quotations from Chinese literature and poetry led to a collaboration on a translation of the canonical anthology,
Three Hundred Tang Poems. Jiang supplied word by word literal translations, then Bynner wrote poems in English which achieved a remarkable balance of faithfulness and literary quality. The volume was published as
The Jade Mountain (New York: Knopf, 1928), which has remained constantly in print. Throughout his life, Jiang continued to promote his views through his personal contacts, through his academic work, and through his writing. When he no longer found the doctrines of anarchism persuasive, he conducted an extensive public debate with anarchist intellectuals such as
Liu Shifu which clarified their points of difference. His views influenced contemporary Chinese who later became major political figures in China. After he became estranged from them, Chinese anarchists accused Jiang of being "hopelessly confused." This confusion was not apparent to
Mao Zedong, who later stated that, as a student, Jiang's writings had been a major influence on the development of his own political, social, and economic theories. In 1933, Jiang returned to China and devoted himself to promoting socialism and traditional Chinese culture. In 1935, Jiang again visited Taiyuan, after Yan Xishan announced plans to implement a system of land reform in Shanxi. Jiang's impression of Yan at this time was so great that Jiang wrote an article lavishing praise on Yan, calling the warlord a "practical rather than a theoretical socialist." ==Notes==