Abstract
The focus of this chapter is “Utopia.” The author admits the utopian orientation of Bishan Project, but it was different from the “Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside” or “People’s Commune” movements mobilized by the state in Mao Zedong era. Instead, it conducted experiments only in a small village, based on a survey of the explorations of individuals and small groups in different historical periods from all over the world. The author traces back all kinds of utopian narratives since Plato’s The Republic and the Chinese Hundred Schools of Thought in the Axis Age, to absorb ideological resources from them; He also learned historical experiences from the Shakers, Harmonites, Robert Owen, Brook Farm, Oneida Community, Kibbutz in Israel, Atarashiki-mura in Japan, Dartington Experiment in England, Rural Reconstruction Movement in the Republic of China and so on. He believes that whenever people are facing a social crisis, they will consciously think about and search for alternatives. In the experiment of Bishan Project, the author was most attracted to Peter Kropotkin's theory of “autonomy” and “mutual aid,” and hoped to turn it into practices. However, under the political conditions he had to face in China, he suffered many setbacks. Although the death of “Bishan Commune” was regarded as the end of his utopian dreams, he believed what Zygmunt Bauman had said in his last book – a “retrotopia” is emerging – that means, the “return of the utopians” is an undeniable fact, revealing dissatisfaction with the current world.
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Notes
- 1.
The International Foundation of Fashion Technology Institute (IFFTI) is a society of fashion education which found in 1999. Every year it has an annual conference hosted by one of its members in different countries. The IFFTI 2015 conference is the seventeenth edition, host by Polimoda in Florence.
- 2.
Hugh Chisholm, ed., The Encyclopedia Brittanica: a dictionary of arts, sciences, literature and general information (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), 914.
- 3.
One example is Liu Shifu (Liu Shih-fu, 1884–1915), often called China’s first anarchist. Liu plotted the assassination of Guangdong Naval Commandant Li Zhun in 1907 and founded the “China Assassination Corps” together with Xie Yingbo, Gao Jianfu (Gou Gimfu), and Chen Jiongming (Ch’en Chiung-ming) in Hong Kong in 1910.
- 4.
Taixu (Tai Hsu, 1890–1947) was a Chinese Buddhist modernist, activist, and thinker. Before the revolution of 1911, he made contact with political radical Pan Dawei, socialist Jiang Kanghu (Kiang Kang-hu), and anarchist Liu Shifu among other revolutionaries, and participated in some secret revolutionary activities in Guangzhou. Later he described the formation of his political thinking during this time: “My social and political thought was based upon from Constitutional Monarchy, to Nationalism Revolution, to Socialism, then to Anarchism. … I came to see Anarchism and Buddhism as close companions, and as a possible advancement from Democratic Socialism.” Taixu, Autobiography (Taipei: Bliss & Wisdom Press, 1996).
- 5.
See Gary Snyder, “Buddhist anarchism,” originally published in Journal for the Protection of All Beings #1 (San Francisco: City Lights, 1961). The online version can be found at The Anarchist Library: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/gary-snyder-buddhist-anarchism.
- 6.
Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2006), 241.
- 7.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 58.
- 8.
Stéphane Hessel, Time for Outrage! (English version, New York: Twelve, 2011).
- 9.
David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004), 38–39.
- 10.
Ibid., 40.
- 11.
David Graeber, “The New Anarchists,” New Left Review 13 (January/February 2002): 70.
- 12.
David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2012), 237.
- 13.
Fan Ye, “Biography of Zhang Lu,” Book of the Later Han.
- 14.
Kang Youwei, The Book of Great Unity (Shanghai: Shanghai Ancient Books Press, 2009).
- 15.
Burt Watson, trans., Han Feizi: Basic Writings (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 101.
- 16.
Ibid., 98.
- 17.
The Oneida community strongly believed in a system of free love which was known as “complex marriage,” where any member was free to have sex with any other who consented.
- 18.
These books are: Erik Reece, Utopia Drive: A Road Trip Through America’s Most Radical Idea (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016); Chris Jennings, Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism (New York: Random House, 2016) and Ellen Wayland-Smith, Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-set Table (New York: Picador, 2016).
- 19.
Erik Reece, Utopia Drive: A Road Trip Through America’s Most Radical Idea (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).
- 20.
Chris Jennings, Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism (New York: Random House, 2016).
- 21.
Ellen Wayland-Smith, Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-set Table (New York: Picador, 2016).
- 22.
Akash Kapur, “The Return of the Utopians”, New Yorker, October 3, 2016, 66–71.
- 23.
Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-hour Workweek (Amsterdam: The Correspondent, 2016).
- 24.
Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght, Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017).
- 25.
Akash Kapur, “Money for Nothing: The Case for a Basic Income,” Financial Times. March 2, 2017.
- 26.
Zygmunt Bauman, Retrotopia (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), 4–5.
- 27.
Ibid., 15.
- 28.
Lao Tzu, Chapter Eighty, Tao Te Ching.
- 29.
Mencius, “Duke Wen of Teng,” Mencius.
- 30.
Chuang Tzu, “Ma Ti,” Nan Hua Jing.
- 31.
Confucius, “Operation of Rites,” The Book of Rites.
- 32.
David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2012), 237.
- 33.
Charles Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements, trans. Ian Patterson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
- 34.
In French, Fourier composed Phalanstère (Phalanstery) with phalange (phalanx) and monastère (monastery) to name the main buildings of his utopia.
- 35.
British architect Thomas Whitwell was invited to design the main buildings for New Harmony, which was an enclosed parallelogram layout. Afterwards, “Parallelogram” became a synonym of the Owenist utopia.
- 36.
Phalanx is a basic unit in the Fourierist utopia.
- 37.
To name the entire district with the enthusiasm of Revivalism.
- 38.
Jennings, Paradise Now, 190.
- 39.
“Kibbutz reinvents itself after 100 years of history,” Taipei Times, November 16, 2010. http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2010/11/16/2003488628/2.
- 40.
More story details can be found in Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Beyond Utopia: New Villages and Living Politics in Modern Japan and across Frontiers,” History Workshop Journal 85, (2018): 47–71.
- 41.
See the manuscript photocopy of Andō Shōeki, Shizen shin’eidō (The True Way of Administering the Society According to Nature, written in classical Chinese in 1753), University of Tokyo General Library. https://iiif.dl.itc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/repo/s/shizen/page/home.
- 42.
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto and Windus & Spokesman Books, 1973).
- 43.
Michael Young, The Elmhirsts of Dartington (Totnes: Dartington Hall Trust, 1996), 257.
- 44.
Jerome Ch’en, The Military-Gentry Coalition: China under the warlords (Toronto: University of Toronto-York University Joint Centre on Modern East Asia, 1979).
- 45.
“A Digital History,” The Rockefeller Foundation, accessed September 9, 2019, https://rockfound.rockarch.org/china.
- 46.
“International Institute of Rural Reconstruction Records (1914–1999)”, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University, accessed September 9, 2019, http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/eresources/archives/rbml/IIRR/main.html.
- 47.
More about the “Dingxian Experiment”: Pearl Buck, Tell the People: Talks With James Yen About The Mass Educational Movement (New York: International Institute of Rural Reconstruction, 1984).
- 48.
See Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012).
- 49.
Guy Alitto, The Last Confucian: Liang Shu-ming and the Chinese Dilemma of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).
- 50.
“History of the Leach Pottery,” Leach Pottery, https://www.leachpottery.com/history.
- 51.
Jin Guantao, “The Utopian Spirit of Chinese Culture,” The 21st Century (No. 2, 1990): 29.
- 52.
Zhao Hong, The Chinese Dream of New Village (Guiyang: Guizhou People’s Press, 2014), 37–43.
- 53.
Fan Ye, “Biography of Zhang Lu,” Book of the Later Han.
- 54.
Julia Lovell, Maoism: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2019).
- 55.
Robert William Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
- 56.
Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 35–58.
- 57.
Jennings, Paradise Now, 125–126.
- 58.
Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” Fortnightly Review (February 1891): 292.
- 59.
David Harvey, Space of Hope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
- 60.
The slogan was used to signify Thatcher’s claim that the market economy is the only system that works, and that debate about this is over.
- 61.
Bauman, Retrotopia, 174–176.
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Ning, O. (2020). Utopian Dreams. In: Utopia in Practice. Contemporary East Asian Visual Cultures, Societies and Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5791-0_15
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