DISSERTATION PROJECT

Utopia – Dystopia.
Beneficent and Adverse Visions of the Future in Late Qing and Early Republican China (ca. 1885–1915)

The intended research project is aimed to explore utopian and dystopian worldviews in China in the crucial period of China’s rite de passage to modernity in the thirty years from ca. 1885–1915. Accordingly, the project is structured into two parts, with the emphasis clearly being put onto the second part, in which elements of dystopian worldviews are detected and subjected to analysis. The protagonist of this second part is Zhang Taiyan (1869–1936). The focus will be placed on three treaties written by Zhang between 1899 and 1907 and an accumulated poem depicting contemporary Japanese society (“Dongyi shi shi shou”, 1910). Moreover, since Zhang Taiyan throughout his scholarly life generally discussed issues of society and the body politic in correlation to questions concerning the human body, health and medicine, special attention will be paid to his writings on medicine from the period under discussion. As to the three selected treatises, the third one, “Discussing the Five Nothings” (“Wuwulun”, 1907), may be regarded as a full-blown dystopia in miniature. It is suspected that this treatise was written in response to what was known at that time about the Book of the Great Unity (Datongshu) by Kang Youwei (1858–1927), the protagonist of the first part and “without a doubt the most powerful figure of China’s convoluted history of ‘utopian’ thinking” (W. Bauer). Being translated into English in 1958, followed by translations into French and German, the Book of the Great Unity has widely received attention by researchers. Yet, the intended study seeks to expand our knowledge about this work in two respects. The opening sections of the two parts exploring utopian and dystopian worldviews, respectively, are each followed by three further sections. In these sections, the focus is being directed to three other fields: fictional literature, pictorial materials, and contemporary discourse in Japan. While a substantial corpus of research literature can be made use of for the first part, it is with the investigations in the second part that the intended study hopes to make a significant contribution to the emergence of utopian writing and thinking in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China by tracing dystopian visions and concepts.