Chinese Utopianism: A Historical Overview

ABSTRACT This article surveys the historical development of Chinese utopianism and its relationship to broader debates in the field of utopian studies. While early scholarship often dismissed utopianism as a uniquely Western tradition, subsequent research has demonstrated that discourses related to the creation of an ideal society occupied a central role in Chinese intellectual, religious, and literary history. Adopting a historical framework, this study identifies four key junctures in the evolution of Chinese utopianism: (1) the emergence of classical philosophical utopianism during the Warring States and Early Imperial periods; (2) the rise of millenarian utopianism in Daoist and Buddhist traditions; (3) the dynamic encounter between the Chinese tradition and Western models of anarchic, socialist, and radical utopias in the late Qing, Republican, and early Communist eras; and (4) the diverse utopian expressions of the post‐Mao Reform Era, including dystopian literature, eco‐villages, revived Confucian projects, and new cosmopolitan theories of world order. In addition to tracing this longue durée trajectory, the article offers a theoretical intervention that moves beyond the conventional sectarian framework of Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist utopias. Instead, it proposes a typology of “major” and “minor” utopias, distinguishing between large‐scale, transformative projects and smaller, localized experiments.