The Biggest Little School in the World: Liming Advanced Middle School (Liming Gaozhong, 1928–34) and Anarchist Education in East Asia

This paper examines Liming Advanced Middle School as an experimental educational project of East Asian anarchists and its influence on post-1945 anarchist education in South Korea and China. Liming Advanced Middle School was established and operated in Quanzhou, Fujian, from 1928 to 1934 by Chinese anarchists whose educational ideal and goals were deeply shared with Korean and Japanese anarchists, both of whom joined the project. The school’s main goal was to accomplish an education that would combine physical and mental labor and realize “education for love” and “life education.” The school was open to all competing thoughts, including communism, and guaranteed freedom of thought in education. Anarchists believed the realization of this education would lead to the culmination of the “Liming spirit,” which in turn would bring about social transformation in China and the world.

Although the transnational goal and ideal of the Liming school disappeared when it was closed in 1934 by the order of the National Government of China, they survived in post-1945 Korea and also were revived later in post-reform China in the 1980s, albeit in the wake of the rising tide of nationalism in both countries. The establishment of Anui Middle School in southern Korea in 1946 by a group of young anarchists was an indication of revived transnational goal and ideal of Liming School in a Korean national setting. The opening of Liming College (later Liming Vocational University) in 1981 in Quanzhou, demonstrates the return of the “Liming spirit” in communist China, although anarchist voices were blurred under the communist modernization project. The paper argues that the Liming School and its successors demonstrate the transnational aspects of an anarchist revolution that aimed at social transformation through alternative education and the obstacles they all faced under nationalism and/or the strong state in realizing the anarchist vision.