Disturbing Reality and Narratives of Hope

This paper explores late Qing and early Republican Chinese intellectuals’ construction of the youth in utopian literature and thought. Utopianism, as a literary genre, was introduced to China at the end of the nineteenth century and spread among revolutionary elites as a way to reflect on the undesirable present and project their hope for an imaginary optimistic future. The younger generation, burdened with the cultural symbolism of possibility and progress in narratives of hope, became crucial in the utopian envisioning of a perfect China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From the perspective of cultural history, this paper uses utopian novels and writings from the 1890s to the 1910s to argue that early modern China’s utopian dreams transformed the nation’s youth from those under protection in traditional crisis heterotopias to hopeful agents in the wishful project of reshaping China to perfection. Chinese intellectuals associated the youth with utopian power in saving the nation, culturally reconstructing the responsibility of youth as reordering China, cultivating new citizens, and regaining the nation’s historical fame. Traditional Chinese descriptions of youth utopia in the Confucian worldview were recast with modernized meanings, though gendered connotations of the Confucianist youth-society relationship still existed in early modern Chinese intellectuals’ design of a perfect world. Western influences also shaped the Chinese utopian dream of overseas students and female youths in sci-tec improvements and ideological enlightenment, bringing a transcultural perspective to textual analysis of early modern Chinese youth in utopias.