The term socialism stands for very different, partially contradictory ideologies and social and political movements. In a larger sense they strive, each with different methodological approaches and strategies, to integrate the individual into the social order, and in a narrower sense they aim at a radical egalitarianism. The latter's goal is an equal distribution of goods, community control over the means of production, and the end of exploitation of people by people.

Socialist ideas are found in the thought of nearly all reformers at the end of the Qing Dynasty. Among them was the …