Career
He was a key figure in the movement, particularly in Canton province, and one of the most important organizers in the Chinese Anarchist tradition. He was one of the first Chinese Revolutionaries to seriously advocate Peasant organizing as a key element of his revolutionary strategy. The Cock-Crow Society, also known as the "Guangzhou Group", is usually described as being “led” by Shifu, and this is generally accurate insofar as we understand it as leadership by example since he was never granted any formal position or coercive authority by the group.
The Guangzhou group used positive assertions of rights and workers, women, peasants, and other oppressed groups to outline their vision of an Anarchist society.
Noticeably absent was any mention of Ethnic minorities, since a basic part of their platform was the elimination of Ethnic, Racial, and National identities in favor of an internationalist identity that placed primary importance on loyalty to humanity as a whole, instead of to ones ethnic or racial group. lieutenant is important to recognize that this position was formulated in response to the primacy placed on ethnicity by the Anti-Manchu movement, which sought to assert the illegitimacy of the Qing dynasty based in part on the fact that its members were part of an ethnic minority out of touch with the Han majority, a position which Anarchists of all four major groups decried as racist and unbefitting a movement that claimed to be working for liberation.
Their position, therefore, was that ethnicity-based organizing promoted Racism, and had no place in a Revolution that sought liberation for all of humanity. He was very active in the movement for the international language Esperanto, in which he used the pseudonym Sifo.