If we are to believe the Enlightenment philosophers, Confucian China compared favorably to the European nations, which were divided by religious discord and political conflict. Therefore it could serve as the location of an alluring utopia, which because of its inaccessibility remained very much a product of the imagination. If I call this utopian interest in China a mode of Orientalism, I use the term in a neutral sense, differently from Edward Said (1978) whose references to Orientalism nearly always imply a pejorative judgment. (The use of the term Orientalism is more elaborately discussed in chapter 12.) The image of China in the years of the early Enlightenment was predominantly shaped by the enthusiastic reports from Jesuit missionaries active in the Middle Kingdom, and not by the earlier account of Marco Polo, which played almost no role in the debate of the seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century sinophiles. Yet the idea of a splendid Chinese civilization had already been fostered by the Venetian merchant and remained influential up to the present day.

Is Marco Polo’s China a utopia? Calvino’s answer

Marco Polo’s Description of the World (Divisament dou monde), which survived in various manuscripts from the early fourteenth century and in its printed versions usually is referred to as The Travels of Marco Polo, is an account of an amazingly adventurous journey of Marco, his father Niccolò and his uncle Maffeo from Venice through the Middle East to Karakorum, the ancient capital of Mongolia, and Khanbalik, present-day Beijing, the residence of Kublai Khan, founder of the Mongol or Yuan dynasty and from 1280 emperor of China. From Khanbalik Marco Polo traveled widely in China, going to regions which nowadays are known as Sichuan and Yunnan as well as to the coastal provinces, to return after many years with his father and uncle by sea via Sumatra, Ceylon, India, and Aden to Venice, where they arrived in 1295.

Like his father and uncle, Marco Polo had a commercial interest in visiting China and neighboring countries. He provides detailed information about the geographical and climatological conditions, military operations, livestock and other means of subsistence, ways of transportation, crime, and punishment.

Among humankind no urge seems stronger than the desire for a better world. From Thomas More’s Utopia or even earlier, from Plato’s Republic, from the chiliastic dreams of Christianity, or Confucius’ concept of a harmonious society, to the recent fictional representation of a world of cloned humans by Michel Houellebecq, human beings have been thinking of alternatives to their present life with its misery, want, and worries. There is no reason for assuming that the representation of such imagined worlds will ever come to a halt.

The combination of desire and imagination has pushed the shape of these other worlds into varying directions. Different from the bucolic idyll and the fairy tale, utopian fiction offers an alternative society that, in addition to being attractive, could be realized in principle. The utopian narrative teaches us how to live; it is always more or less didactic. It does not simply indulge in wishful thinking or fantasy, but includes details about the political and economic aspects of society, notably in the European variant of the genre. Yet it differs from the political tract and party program, which aim at short-term change, as it may make a great leap forward into an imagined future that still may be hundreds of years away.

In order to be convincing it will tell about a secluded world, uncontaminated by the evils of contemporary life. Usually it begins with a journey to an island or an inaccessible mountain range, to some imaginary country or another planet, or into faraway times. Utopian fiction is a genre that clearly depends on our willingness to accept the improbable setting. Thus it calls for a robust activation of the literary convention originally defined by Coleridge as the “willing suspension of disbelief” (1907: vol. 2, 6). Writers of utopian narratives therefore affirm their literary lineage rather ostentatiously by way of explicit intertextual relations, such as Huxley referring to Shakespeare, Swift and Wells to More and Plato, Houellebecq to Wells, Lao She to Swift, Lin Yutang to Rousseau and Zhuang Zi.

More’s Utopia (1516) set an example for later writers who criticized the social conventions of their times by designing an ideal society. For the remarkable thing of More’s fiction is that it combined an abstract discussion of a utopian society with hardly veiled political criticism of autocratic rulers, such as the English and French kings in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The independent opinions expressed by More in his various functions – as a member of parliament, a privy councillor to Henry VIII, and lord chancellor of England – were bound to bring him into conflict with the king. When he refused to acknowledge Henry VIII as the supreme head of the Church, he was charged with treason and beheaded in 1535. More’s intellectual independence and courage already appeared from his social criticism in Utopia. Its combination of a sketch of the ideal society and a critique of contemporary government has remained a characteristic of the genre of utopian fiction and has set it apart from the idyll as well as the satire by combining elements of both.

In Utopia the narrator, who bears the name of the author, records a story that is told to him by Raphael Hythlodaeus – or, in Turner’s translation, Raphael, the dispenser of nonsense – about his journey to an island off the Brazilian coast, where he found a sort of welfare state providing every member of the community with the necessary food, clothing, housing, education, and medical treatment. It is a society characterized by a communal way of life without money, or, in Turner’s highly naturalizing translation, “communism minus money” (More 2003: 113). A more literal translation as well as the original Latin text can be found in an edition by Logan et al. (More 1995: 246-247).

Utopia is divided into two books: the first one, which is structured as a dialogue between Raphael and More and refers to the mismanagement and abuses of power in Tudor England, was written after the second; the second book, written during a long sojourn in the Southern Netherlands in 1515, is an uninterrupted description of the Utopian Republic and reads like an essay rather than a story.

As a prolific writer and prophet of optimism and progress, Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) played a crucial role in the history of utopian fiction. After a few stories which expressed his endeavor to wake up humanity and draw attention to the dangers ahead of us, including the disaster of increasing class conflict and the astronomical catastrophe of an earth inevitably cooling off, he projected different fictional blueprints of a world state unencumbered by a history of revolution. His attempts to revitalize the utopian tradition attracted not only a wide readership but also the interest of state leaders. Single-handedly he appeared to offer an alternative to Marxist revolution, Communist ideals, and Fascist politics. In the 1920s and later, however, he clearly overplayed his hand and was blamed for being naive. Nevertheless, his keen interest in scientific and technological innovation as well as his involvement in contemporary political developments made his work preeminently modern. Undoubtedly a man of high intelligence, his weakness was that he wanted too much and too soon. By the time of World War II, he had forfeited almost all credit that he had enjoyed at the turn of the century. He explicitly situated himself in the tradition of utopian writing and must have deplored the strong anti-utopian reactions triggered by his work. The dystopian narratives by Zamyatin, Huxley, and Orwell were a critical response to Wells’s eutopian fiction as well as to current sociopolitical developments.

Still, dystopian themes and situations occurred in Wells’s early fiction too, notably in The Time Machine (1895) and When the Sleeper Wakes (1899). The Time Machine postulates a fourth dimension along which it is possible to travel by means of a vehicle designed by the time traveler. He finds that, more than eight hundred thousand years from now, mankind has evolved into two species, the Eloi, frail little creatures with the intellect of a child who live above ground, and the ape-like Morlocks, who live in a subterranean world. The Eloi, who in a somewhat different role occur also in Houellebecq’s La Possibilité d’une île, live their decadent life in a quasi-paradisiacal landscape. Unchallenged by competitors and pampered by utopian conditions, they have lost the vigor and energy they once had.

Utopian fiction is arguably the most political of all literary genres and can be studied from a literary as well as a political point of view. Political scientists have taken the vantage point of their own discipline in their studies of utopian designs and projects. However, in my examination of utopian narratives, I have chosen the framework of literary scholarship, assuming, as Ricoeur has done, that narration employs specific strategies of persuasion that expository arguments do not and that the cognitive and emotive effects of narration on the readers’ mind differ from those of predominantly rational expositions. In a literary reading, formal devices, such as metaphor and hyperbole, setting and plot, irony and parody, add to the significance of a text. Historical research about the rise and diffusion of a literary genre requires examination of the reception of texts, including creative response, rewriting, and intertextual relations.

Writers of utopian fiction often emphasize the literary tradition to which they wish to belong. They claim a respectable lineage and by doing so underscore the respectability of the genre as well as their own utopian narrative. For instance, Cabet refers in his utopian novel to Rousseau, Campanella, Bacon, Thomas More, and Plato. Wells cites Bellamy, Morris, Cabet, Bacon, and Campanella, and also More and Plato. Skinner mentions a similar list of predecessors, including new names such as Thoreau, Butler, and Hilton. Such tributes to the authors of utopian fiction indicate the awareness of a limited and valuable body of utopian narratives – a “canon” of utopian literature – that have influenced the selection of texts discussed in this book.

In Chinese literature, intertextual references similarly provide a lead for finding interesting utopian texts. Here Confucius’ utopia, which can be gleaned from the Analects, is a point of departure and has triggered both approbatory and, in modern times, rather critical reactions; the Confucian legacy has been subjected to fundamental criticism in Lu Xun’s dystopian narratives. Lao She shows in his Cat Country to be indebted to Swift; Lin Yutang refers to Rousseau and Zhuang Zi; Wang Shuo’s dystopian fiction ridicules the heroic, indeed utopian, models of Maoist times.

As explained in the introductory chapter, my analysis of the major instances of utopian fiction has been guided by four hypotheses. Admittedly, their phrasing was vague to an extent that almost prevented their refutation. The first assumption, for instance, established a link between moments of cultural crisis and the rise of utopian fiction. It is of course possible to survey – more strictly than I have done – the rise and decline of utopian narratives in specific periods of time, but the notion of crisis remains a rather subjective and weak element in the observation that a cultural crisis would favor utopian fiction. By what criteria should we allow ourselves to speak of a cultural crisis?

However, there is some general agreement that in Europe the early sixteenth century constituted a moment of crisis and reorientation, caused by the rediscovery of classical antiquity (and its challenge to the monopoly of Christian culture), reports coming from the explorers of unknown continents, the Reformation (which split the Roman Catholic Church), and a revolution in the dissemination of knowledge resulting from the invention of printing. It was the time when Thomas More wrote his epoch-making Utopia. Similarly, there is agreement about the impact of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. The secular doctrine of historical progress and the principles of equality, toleration, and reason subverted the Judeo-Christian tradition. The severe resistance to these new ideas is symptomatic of the awareness of a cultural crisis, to which Condorcet reacted with his fundamental essay on the progress of the human mind and Mercier, Cabet, and Souvestre responded with their utopian and dystopian fiction. In China, the aggression of foreign powers, the Taiping Rebellion, and the attempts at political reform at the end of the nineteenth century and during the first decades of the twentieth century led undeniably to a sense of crisis. Political change and a cultural reorientation provided the grounds for an intensification of utopian thinking, both in the form of political programs and literary works.

The question must be asked whether at present, as several authors suggest, the world is in a similar philosophical and ideological crisis that calls for eutopian and/or dystopian writing.

The term “Occidentalism” refers to a body of usually simplified and often biased views about Western culture. These mental constructions, carrying either positive or negative connotations, may become ideological instruments in polemics and politics (Carrier 1995). A nineteenth-century coinage, the term was introduced into critical discourse about China by Chen Xiaomei (1992), who in her Occidentalism (1995) mainly focused on anti-official Occidentalism in post-Mao China, a kind of counterdiscourse that purveyed a positive image of a scientific and modern West contradicting Maoist orthodoxy. Not being aware of Chen’s pioneering work, Buruma and Margalit use the term Occidentalism in a more limited sense as “a dehumanizing picture of the West painted by its enemies” (2004: 5). Chen Xiaomei as well as Buruma and Margalit are indebted to Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), an analysis of Western conceptions of the East. Crucial differences between Said and Chen are that the latter examines both positive and negative images of the Other, whereas Said does not investigate how the discourse of Orientalism relates to empirical knowledge of the East. He is concerned, “not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency of Orientalism” (1991: 5). Nevertheless, Said’s Orientalism often implies a negative judgment as he interprets Orientalist discourse as an attempt to deprecate the Orient and, ultimately, to justify colonial politics. The genuine interest of Voltaire, Goethe, Hesse, Hilton, and Huxley in Eastern literature and philosophy falls outside his perspective (Fokkema 1996; Weiss 2004; Figueira 2008).

From a cognitive point of view, the term Orientalism is a shorthand name for a body of simplified views about “the East” current among writers and critics living in “the West.” And, the other way round, Occidentalism refers to a reductionist image of “the West,” maintained by writers and critics in “the East.” We cannot communicate without such reductive concepts that often are partly distortions and sometimes completely wrong. Yet, and here I agree with Chen Xiaomei rather than later critics, it is not necessary that these reductive concepts should implicitly have a pejorative meaning. In principle, they are neutral linguistic labels. As Chen has shown, Occidentalism in China in the second half of the twentieth century served first to describe a repugnant West in an attempt to bolster Maoist orthodoxy, and later, after the death of Mao Zedong, functioned as a lever to undermine Maoist ideology.

The production of various forms of utopian fiction in twentieth-century Europe and America is enormous so only some of the major trends can be discussed here. Both positive and negative utopias appeared, but the latter attracted more attention: in response to the infelicitous, violent, and plainly criminal attempts to realize utopian projects, with well-known counterproductive results, some highly interesting dystopian novels were written.

Apart from the growth of dystopian fiction in reaction to unchecked technological and disastrous political developments, there is another factor that has radically changed the writing and reading of utopias. Increasing democracy and the introduction of universal electoral suffrage stimulated not only the political but also the cultural autonomy of individuals, who felt less and less bound to remain loyal to traditional beliefs and conventions. The reactions to social wrongs and to projects for correcting them were also individualized. The essentially Manichaean distinction between eutopia and dystopia was relativized, not only because, at least since Mande - ville and Swift, awareness had grown that a eutopian society would never be realized on earth, but also because the judgment whether a particular text was to be considered eutopian or dystopian appeared to be linked to a critical reader’s individual value system. It is not farfetched to suspect that the emphasis on the role of the reader in literary communication after World War II had been made possible by the gradual democratic emancipation of individuals in the first half of the century. As mentioned in the introduction, the judgment whether Plato’s Republic represents a eutopia or a dystopia depends on the reader’s personal affinity with the abolition of family life and the organization of regulated promiscuity and eugenics. Similarly, the credibility of the eutopian perspective in socialist-realist fiction depends on the reader’s affinity with Communist ideology, just as there is some logic in the rejection of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four or Zamyatin’s We by Communist critics.

At a basic, textual level, however, most critics agree that some narratives are clearly dystopian and others eutopian, whereas in some others yet again the two generic modes appear in combination. In this chapter I shall first discuss fiction that generally is considered dystopian, then turn to some well-known attempts to represent positive utopias, and finally comment on texts whose utopian purport remains ambiguous.

In comparison with More’s Utopia, Campanella’s description of a perfect society known in English as The City of the Sun appears to be both one step back and one step forward. Campanella’s utopia manifests regression in that it has a millenarian inspiration and shows the realization of biblical prophecies in a theocratic society. Thomas More, however, in his Utopia – though not as lord chancellor – argued for toleration of different beliefs and, in principle, expounded the idea of a separation of church and state. On the other hand, Campanella is more modern than More in his firm defense of unrestrained scientific investigation. He shares this scientific orientation with his slightly older contemporary Francis Bacon, but there is no indication that he knew Bacon’s publications, nor that Bacon had more than superficial knowledge of Campanella’s work.

The discovery of the sciences: Campanella and Bacon

Born into a poor family in Stilo, Calabria, Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639) became a Dominican monk when he was fourteen years old. He hoped to receive a solid education in this way and indeed was soon considered one of the most learned scholars of Italy. But he did not have much luck in his career. His independent interpretation of the patristic tradition and the Bible brought him into conflict with the Inquisition, while at the same time he was persecuted for his participation in an unsuccessful rebellion against the Spanish domination of southern Italy. In 1599 he was arrested by the Spanish authorities. He could escape execution by pretending insanity but remained in various prisons for most of the rest of his life. Nevertheless, he wrote a voluminous oeuvre on a wide range of subjects – on poetics and metaphysics, theology and medicine, the empirical sciences and astrology – both in Italian and Latin. Some of these works have been lost; others were smuggled out of prison and published.

Before his arrest he stayed briefly in northern Italy, in Bologna and Florence, and in Padua, where he enrolled at the university and in 1593 met Galileo, four years his senior. His admiration for and loyal friendship with Galileo appears from his Defense of Galileo (Apologia pro Galileo), written in jail in 1616 and published in Germany in 1622.

The Enlightenment took varied forms and proceeded at different paces across Europe, but there is one characteristic that can be recognized in the variegated manifestations of Enlightenment thought: the emancipation from authoritative conceptions of religion, government, and philosophy as they appeared to be incapable of withstanding rational criticism and individual empirical observation. Through the course of the eighteenth century people attached greater and greater value to individual judgment.

Not everyone shared in this development, which, for a long time, remained restricted to an elite of writers and philosophers, but by the end of the century the critique of divine revelation, despotic government, and abstract speculative philosophy had become widely accepted. The trend toward secularization, democracy, and empiricism was openly discussed and led to institutional changes. These occurred slowly in some countries; in France it took place by way of an abrupt revolution in which the banner of liberté, égalité, fraternité was raised and a utopian project was acclaimed that never fully materialized, but has remained an elusive ideal ever since.

Relativism versus utopianism

In contrast to the decades just before the French Revolution, the first half of the eighteenth century was not propitious for writing eutopian narratives. Mandeville, who excused private vices as the unavoidable ingredients of public benefits, had absolutely rejected the endeavor of realizing a eutopia. Swift was skeptical about attempts to design a perfect world. Montesquieu and Voltaire doubted the significance of utopian experiments; they were relativists, not utopianists.

In his Lettres persanes (Persian Letters), published anonymously in Amsterdam in 1721, Montesquieu was critical of the religious and administrative conditions in both Persia and France. One of the early epistolary novels, it has the charm of novelty. Its combination of imagined inside information about Persian customs and Islamic culture with a quasi-outsider’s view of the Roman Catholic Church and French civil authorities, with a special interest in irrational behavior and abuse, was also surprisingly new. It is a great satirical novel, and not a utopian narrative, except for some letters (10 to 14), which go into the question of whether human beings are “happy because of the pleasures and satisfactions of the senses, or because of the practice of virtue” (“heureux par les plaisirs et les satisfactions des sens, ou par la pratique de la vertu” [Montesquieu 1956: 21]).

At the time when Li Ruzhen wrote his Flowers in the Mirror, Europe was gradually recovering from the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. The first decades of the nineteenth century were marked by a period of cultural crisis, with the utopian imagination trying to find a solution for the urgent social problems which the French Revolution had brought to the surface but had failed to solve. European intellectuals and politicians were torn between rationalism and romanticism, agnosticism and religion, reactionary forces and imminent revolution. They were challenged to choose between, on the one hand, the rationalist legacy of Condorcet and the technological utopianism of Saint-Simon, and, on the other, the tradition of celebrating nature in the wake of Rousseau and a free play of the emotions in the utopianism of Fourier, a precursor of Freud according to Ricoeur (1986). In the political and intellectual turmoil of the first half of the nineteenth century small-scale experiments were launched, designed to implement various shades of socialism. North America offered a hospitable environment for such experiments with communal ways of life. Ever since the Declaration of Independence of 1776 America had played an increasingly important role in the Enlightenment debate and the subsequent discussion on democracy. Even the old Goethe incorporated the theme of emigration to North America in his partly utopian novel Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre(1829, Wilhelm Meister’s Travels).

It was a period of boiling activity, both intellectually and in industry. The steam engine inflamed the imagination. Technological progress as evidenced in the railway system and new means of communication raised the expectation that social problems could also be solved. The industrial and political fervor in Europe differs strikingly from the ironic complacency with which Li Ruzhen looked at the Chinese cultural tradition. As we shall see in chapter 12, it was little over a decade later, notably during the AngloChinese War of 1839-1842 – the so-called “Opium War” – that China was confronted with a technologically and militarily superior European power, as a result of which it was forced to give up its splendid cultural isolation that had protected a stale Confucianism and an escapist Daoism.

Marx and Engels had their utopian visions of a classless society and the withering away of the state, and so did Mao Zedong. But Mao’s utopianism was different, in that it was embedded in the Chinese tradition, eschewed economic problems, was motivated by a subjectivist philosophy, and called for voluntarist action.

Mao’s utopian dreams and their calamitous realization

The Hundred Flowers policy, which Mao announced in May 1956, was couched in traditional terms. “Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools contend” (baihua qifang, baijia zhengming) was the political slogan that remained valid for about a year until the policy was redressed and the Anti-Rightist campaign began. The second part of the slogan, as Lu Dingyi, director of the Propaganda Department of the Communist Party, explained, referred to the historical periods of the Spring and Autumn Annals (8th to 5th century BCE) and the Warring States (5th to 3rd century BCE), during which many schools of thought contended with each other for supremacy, thus creating a lively intellectual atmosphere. The lineage of the first part of the slogan, which pertained to the flourishing of literature and the arts, was not officially explained and has rarely been commented on in Western publications. It had been used earlier, in 1951, to boost theatrical reform and the development of different operatic styles. However, intellectuals with some knowledge of literary history must have surmised that the appeal to “let a hundred flowers bloom” derived from the novel Flowers in the Mirror in which Empress Wu in defiance of the Flowers Fairy ordered all flowers to bloom at the same time (see above, chapter 7). I do not know whether the origin of the slogan had any bearing on its meaning, but the wording of the phrase certainly has a voluntarist connotation.

Anglo-American sinologist Stuart Schram, an expert on Mao Zedong thought, detects a “utopian vision” (1991: 33) in the idea of a Great Leap Forward and the establishment of the People’s Communes in 1958. Founded on the basis of agricultural cooperatives, the People’s Communes replaced the wage system by a free-supply system. The large common dining halls that were utopian in the fiction of More, Chernyshevsky (Vera’s dream in What Is to Be Done?), and Bellamy were actually realized in the Chinese countryside.

Until the eighteenth century most European stories about utopian societies were situated on an island. Undoubtedly that convention was partly motivated by the discovery, since the days of Columbus and Vespucci, of faraway territories. Often, the land where seafarers anchored after voyages of many months was an island, with a mild or tropical climate, lush vegetation, and rich wildlife. The natural setting appeared idyllic, and if the inhabitants were not openly hostile their different way of life could arouse the utopian imagination and would stimulate the projection of an ideal state without religious conflict, political corruption, economic hardship, or oppressive sexual morality. Thomas More set an example in this respect too, as his Utopia was situated on an island near the Brazilian coast. The insular geography provided an ideal setting for the construction of a perfect society. The inhabitants could easily ward off unwelcome intruders and contact with the depraved outer world was not encouraged.

The changing European tradition

The seafaring explorers of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were not the first to consider the island a topos of potential bliss. A thousand years earlier the legendary Irish monk Saint Brendan had located a mythical island resembling paradise that some commentators have identified as one of the Canary Islands. Still earlier, in Greek mythology, the Garden of the Hesperides with its much desired sacred apples was situated on an island west of the Strait of Gibraltar, and Plato recorded the oral tradition of the beautiful island of Atlantis to which Bacon referred in his New Atlantis.

Critias, one of the characters in the dialogues Timaeus and Critias, is the major source of information about Atlantis. Plato goes to some lengths to emphasize the historical reliability of Critias’s story by explaining its narrative genealogy. As a young boy Critias had learned from his grandfather about the visit of the statesman and poet Solon (c. 640-c. 560 BCE) to Egypt. An elderly Egyptian priest had told Solon that, different from the Greeks, they had recorded the ancient history of Athens and Atlantis in the sacred writings that were preserved in their temples.