[7] Normally educated as a child while along with other teenagers being shocked by the result of the First Sino-Japanese War in that era, he earned the top place in the local examinations of Guangdong in 1898.

[8] The next year, Liu, due to his disappointment in Chinese politics, failed the provincial examination in Guangzhou on purpose, which greatly astonished his father.

[2][6] After failing the test, Liu undertook his first reform activities by helping a reading group to study books and magazines for the new knowledge and organizing a public speaking society.

[9] They also set up a branch of their reading group in Macau, where Shifu met Zheng Guangong [zh], one of the most radical Chinese thinkers in that era, and started a girls' school in Xiangshan.

[9] Alongside these reform activities Liu maintained a quest for knowledge to meet his country's needs, and for a viewpoint, some broader sense of how China ought to be transformed.

Upon conversion to anarchism he denounced these tactics as counter-productive and switched his focus to grass-roots organizing among peasants and workers in order to build a revolutionary mass movement.

It 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.