Lost Agrarian Futures: Rural Utopianism and Industrial Dissent on the Eve of China's Communist Revolution

A debate in the early 1940s between two social scientists, Yang Kaidao and Zhou Xianwen, reinvigorated a national conversation about China's relationship with agriculture. Clearly China's roots were agrarian, but was it destined to remain "a country founded on agriculture," in which the rural village remained the focal point of the state and the nucleus of society, or must the republic industrialize in order to thrive? If the answer seems obvious to the present-day observer, it remained debatable on the eve of the Communist revolution. This paper uses the Yang-Zhou debate as a window on past visions of an agrarian future that were impassioned yet full of irony: agricultural fundamentalists pointed to settled cultivation as a distinctive and transhistorical feature of the Chinese state, but their arguments and policy recommendations echoed similar movements in Japan, Italy, Latvia, and many other twentieth-century states. I argue that we ought to recognize China's twentieth-century agrarian fundamentalism as both an understudied fulcrum of Chinese nationalism, and a node in a global agrarian-nationalist movement that declined after World War II with the ascendance of industrial agriculture and new technologies; its postwar legacies in the Republic of China (Taiwan) and the People’s Republic of China are subtle but significant.