Zhu Qianzhi was born in
Fuzhou in 1899, the son of a physician. After coming of age, he enrolled at the
University of Beijing and went on to study
philosophy. He worked for an
anarchist student newspaper and posted one of the first
big-character posters, calling for students to boycott exams and for the university to stop issuing degrees. During the
May Fourth Movement, Zhu turned himself into the police after a friend of his was caught carrying one of his anarchist pamphlets. During his three months in prison, he developed his revolutionary ideas into the book
Philosophy of Revolution (1921). The book critiqued the philosophical schools of
rationalism and
utilitarianism, which were gaining popularity in the
Republic of China at the time, and focused on
crowd psychology. Despite attempts to suppress the book, it received numerous print runs.
Wu Zhihui came to regard Zhu as one of the leading representatives of the new generation of Chinese philosophy. After publishing his book, Zhu moved to
Hangzhou and lived a secluded life for a number of years. He went to study in
Japan in the late 1920s, then moved to
Guangzhou in 1932 and took a position at
Sun Yat-sen University. By the late 1930s, Zhu had become a supporter of
Chiang Kai-shek's
Nationalist government and quoted Chiang's invocation of action rather than searching for knowledge. He saw Chiang's campaign of
mass mobilization in terms of unity between the crowd and a mobilizer. Following the
establishment of the
People's Republic of China, the new government forced Zhu to write numerous
self-criticisms of his anti-rationalist and anti-Marxist philosophy. During the
Cultural Revolution, Zhu attempted to distance himself from his anarchist past and retroactively claim himself as a forerunner of communist revolutionary theories on the role of the masses. His ideas on
emotionality and
spontaneity as driving forces in revolution were later echoed by
Mao Zedong and the
Chinese Communist Party during subsequent mass mobilizations. Zhu himself died in 1972. ==References==