page_title: Li Shizeng
section_title: Diligent Work-Frugal Study Movement
hierarchical_section_title: Li Shizeng / Revolution in China and friendship with France / Diligent Work-Frugal Study Movement
caption_attribution_description: English: Beancurd Factory Nightschool
context_page_description: Li Shizeng was an educator, promoter of anarchist doctrines, political activist, and member of the Chinese Nationalist Party in early Republican China.
  After coming to Paris in 1902, Li took a graduate degree in chemistry and biology, then, along with his lifelong friends Wu Zhihui and Zhang Renjie, was a founder of the Chinese anarchist movement and a supporter of Sun Yat-sen's revolutionary activities. He organized cultural exchange between France and China, established the first factory in Europe to manufacture and sell beancurd, and created Diligent Work-Frugal Study programs which brought Chinese students to France for work in factories. In the 1920s, Li, Zhang, Wu, and Cai Yuanpei were known as the fiercely anti-communist "Four Elders" of the Chinese Nationalist Party.
context_section_description: In April 1912, still excited by the prospect of the new-born Chinese Republic, Li, Zhang Renjie, Wu Zhihui, and Cai Yuanpei founded in Beijing the Association for Frugal Study in France (留法儉學會 Liufa jianxue hui), also known as the Society for Rational French Education (la Societé Rationelle des Etudiants Chinois en France). At that time, most students who went abroad went on government scholarships to Japan, though the Chinese Educational Mission of 1872-1881 and the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program sent students to the United States.  In contrast to his own experience on the 1902 program as an "embassy scholar", which involved only a handful of students from privileged families, Li hoped to welcome hundreds of working-class students into his program.  For Li, work-study continued to have a moral as well as an educational function. In addition to making workers more knowledgeable, work-study would eliminate their "decadent habits" and transform them into morally upright and hard-working citizens 
  Yuan Shikai's opposition closed the program down. In September 1913, after Yuan violently suppressed Sun's "second revolution", Li and Wang Jingwei took their families to France for safety. Wang lived with Li in Montargis and lectured to the Work-Study students. The bean-curd factory began to do better. Over the first five years, bean-curd sales averaged only 500 pieces (cakes) per month but increased to 10,000 a month in 1915, sometimes to more than 17,000 pieces a month. In 1916, however, wartime conditions forced the factory to close (it re-opened in 1919, when post-war milk shortages made soy milk more attractive).
  The outbreak of war in Europe in 1914 led the French government to recruit Chinese workers for their factories. By the end of the war, the Chinese Labor Corps in France brought more than 130,000 workers, mostly from North China villages. In June 1915, Li and his friends in Paris took advantage of this opportunity to provide schooling and training for those working in French factories. They renewed the Work-Study program, though on a different basis, involving less educated workers rather than students. By March 1916 their Paris group, the Societe Franco-Chinoise d'Education (華法教育會 Hua-Fa jiaoyuhui) was directly involved in recruiting and training these workers. They pressed the French government to give the workers technical education as well as factory work, and Li wrote extensively in the Chinese Labor Journal (Huagong zazhi), which introduced Western science, the arts, fiction, and current events. 
  In 1921, after Li had returned to China, leaders of riots in Lyons against the leadership of the program were expelled from the country. The younger generation of students then became angry critics who dismissed anarchism and rejected older leaders. The Sino-French Institute did not became central to Sino-French relations.
caption: Doufu Factory Nightschool 1916
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