Wang Guangqi, a prominent social activist who was the leader of ‘the Young China Society’ and the ‘Work-study Movement’, went abroad to study in April 1920, and from around 1923 onward, he spent the rest of his life studying Chinese and the Western music. While this change of character may seem incongruous, there was an important common factor in these two seemingly very different activities: the ideals of the ‘Young China’ that he had emphasized from early on, and the ‘Preliminary Work’ needed to realize it. The ‘Yong China’ he envisioned was a world which was ‘liberated’ from both domestic and international restraints. In order to create such a society, it was necessary to first cultivate ‘new people’ suitable for the ‘new society’. This required collective life experience based on ‘labor’ and ‘mutual assistance’, and ‘cultural revival’ and ‘life renovation’ through ‘academic research’ and ‘education’, ‘industrialization’. Wang Guangqi believed that what China needed at the time was not a specific ideology, but this kind of ‘Preliminary Work’. If the ‘Work-study Movement’ and the ‘New Village Movement’ were the ‘Preliminary Work’ for the liberation from domestic restraints, Wang’s study of Chinese music was the ‘Preliminary Work’ for the liberation from international restraints. Wang Guangqi hoped that through the study of Chinese music, the national culture of the Chinese people could be revitalized, and through this, the self-consciousness of the people could also be promoted. Like many young Chinese anarchists of his time, Wang Guangqi denied the concept of ‘nation’ but affirmed the concept of ‘people’. He dreamed of a ‘Young World’ made up of the free union of different ethnic groups, including the Chinese people. Wang Guangqi's ‘Work-study Movement’ and music studies were just the two different parts of the ‘Preliminary work’ needed to realize his ‘Young China’.