Dreaming a Future for China: Visions of Socialism among Chinese Intellectuals in the Early 1930s

Abstract

The article examines Chinese leftist intellectuals’ visions of China’s future as they were published in a special issue of Dongfang zazhi (Eastern Miscellany) in 1933. It places their texts in the international tradition of socialism and in particular the tensions between Marxism and “utopian socialism.” Two variants of socialism can be identified in the Chinese texts: “Datong socialism,” the moral vision of a society of freedom and equality, and Soviet socialism, the vision of an industrialized society with features and institutions as in the Soviet Union. Supporters of both variants identified with the “masses,” but remained elitist in that they spoke on behalf of these masses and claimed an intellectual niche in the proletarian society of the future.