Creating “New Men” in Everyday Life: “New Villages” in China and the Cultural Politics of Accumulation

From 1919-1921, the debate of “new village” (xincun) was launched by the “New Culture Movement” intellectuals to discuss a proposal of a new type of community, in which a collective “new life” could be organized to generate “new men” (xinren). As the result of the debate, “new village” became a method of social transformation by reorganizing labor and social relations through reconstructing everyday life, which, for the Chinese socialists, communists, and liberals, had been experimented as the critique of capitalism after the WWI by Mushanokōji’s atarashiki-mura in Japan, Robert Owen’s utopianist communes and the “country-town” in Britain, and the church reform movement in the United States. In 1922, “model new villages” emerged as the spatial proposals in China for the local experiments in first the rural construction movement and the housing project for the urban poor from the 1929 to 1936.

This paper explores the new village debate, the “model new village” proposals, and a few examples of the new villages in the rural and urban construction projects to elaborate the transnational politics of constructing a communal life and a new form of society in the early 20th century. The paper argues that the new village movement in China manifested the cultural politics of primary accumulation in China, which paralleled with the global capitalist development in the early 20th century. Although the idea of “new village” or atarashiki-mura was originally an anarchist concept and social experiment against capital accumulation and alienation of labor, its reconceptualization and social practices in China were implemented for multiple economic and political agendas in China in the 1920s-30s.