The Dissemination and Availability of Western Ideas of the Agrarian in Modern China

Abstract

20th-century Chinese history has been widely interpreted as part of a perennial search for modernity. While city-making has undoubtedly played a significant part in China’s path to modernization, there were also key moments when reformers—such as Zhang Jian, Sun Yat-sen, Zhou Zuoren, Zhang Yongnian, Liu Shaoqi, and Mao Zedong—repeatedly turned their commitments to rural alternatives. Instead of following the dominant city-centered paradigm, a range of reformist projects demonstrated a shared belief that an agrarian modernity could be realized through mobilized localities and dedicated professionals. Although these rural reforms have left a notable imprint on China’s modern history and have been dealt with extensively across many disciplines, architecture and planning disciplines have remained largely disengaged from these agrarian topics, focusing instead on the more legible—and at times even ceremonious—results of urban development. This dissertation addresses this gap, focusing on the often-neglected rural reforms and the history of ideas that took shape well before the reforms themselves. It argues that a range of ideas, images, and models of the agrarian modern—though largely unfamiliar to most Chinese by the turn of the 20th century—were disseminated from the West and ultimately made available to relevant audiences in China. In doing so, this dissertation offers a more nuanced understanding of the often-overlooked notion of agrarian modernity in the design disciplines and, more importantly, situates modern rural schemes and practices in China within a global intellectual framework that transcends the conventional East-West divide.