Posts Categorized: Reform

Art for the Masses: Mao Zedong’s Yan’An Lectures

At the 1942 Yan’An Forum on Literature in Art, held in the Shaanxi city of Yan’An, Mao Zedong delivered a series of lectures on the role played by the literary arts in shaping, and being shaped by, the “soldier, farmer, and worker.” While not literature per se, they still played a huge role in Party […]

That’s One Weird Utopia: Kang Youwei’s “Book of Great Unity”

There were a lot of texts dealing with reform in the late Qing (1895-1911), but few of them were more radical, or more bizarre, than Kang Youwei’s Book of Great Unity (《大同书》). The venerable linguist and Confucian scholar advocated a future utopia in which not only would governments and international commerce no longer exist, but even species […]