The Book of Great Unity (Datong shu)

Introduction

Kang Youwei, leader of the failed Hundred Days’ Reform of 1898, wrote this utopia in exile, drawing on ideas from the 1880s. Starting from the Confucian ideal of “Great Unity” in the Book of Rites, he describes nine “boundaries” – among them nation, class, race, sex, family and property – that cause suffering, and a future world government in which they are abolished: marriage becomes a contract of at most a year, children are raised in public institutions, and the races are to merge, a programme that rests on racist assumptions. In 1949 Mao Zedong cited the book as a vision whose author had found no way to realise it.

Connections

Builds on

• Analects (Lunyu)c. 450 BCE · Confucius