You’ve heard of the Red Cross and the Green Crescent, but how about the Red Swastika Society.
The Red Swastika Society is a voluntary association founded in China in 1922 by Qian Nengxun, Du Bingyin and Li Jiabai. Together with the organization’s president Li JianChiu, they set up their establishment of the federation in Beijing. As the philanthropic branch of the Daodeshe “Society of Dao and Virtue”, a syncretist Daoist school, which changed at the same time its name to Daoyuan. The swastika (? wàn; “infinity”, “all”) in Chinese and other cultures is a symbol of the manifestation of God or its creation. It was one of a number of new transnational world redemptive societies founded at the time in China, drawing on Western examples such as the Red Cross to build charitable institutions grounded in religions such as Buddhism and Daoism. (The swastika originated as a Hindu/Buddhist religious symbol, and is still associated more strongly with that usage than with the hakenkreuz of Nazism in the Far East.) Reports of its strength during the 1920s and 1930s seem to vary widely, with citations of 30,000 “members” in 1927 to 7–10 million “followers” in 1937.
Generally, its mission was a broad based effort of philanthropy and moral education. It ran poorhouses and soup kitchens, as well as modern hospitals and other relief works. It had an explicit internationalist focus, extending relief efforts to Tokyo after earthquakes and also in response to natural disasters in the Soviet Union. In addition, it had offices in Paris, London, and Tokyo and professors of Esperanto within its membership.