In the early 20th century, China was deeply influenced by Western colonialism and faced a dual crisis of national and individual anxiety. How to imagine and shape “new human”, or “new Chinese” in the context of modernization, was one of the important topics for Chinese intellectuals. This issue was also related to political, economic, cultural and other practices, and affected China's modern social transformation.

I want to turn to the important discourses on “new human” in the early 20th China's historical context, to explore the evolution and reasons of “new human” discourses, and the complex entanglement between the “new human” issue and the China/West, tradition/modernity issues under the theoretical lens of post colonialism. Therefore, I intend to describe this phenomenon in three stages, from Liang Qichao in the late Qing Dynasty, who urged to put forward the theory of “new people” because of people's lack of consciousness of publicity, to Lu Xun who fiercely criticized the traditional oppression of human nature and put forward the national criticism during the New Culture Movement, and to the ideological transformation proposed by the CPC after the 1940s, each with a particular emphasis on the physical and mental intervention of Chinese people. All of them tried to invent more modern and rational individuals and groups, so as to achieve respective national imagination and construction. 

With this historical study, I aim to propose that the “new human” discourse is a power discourse that in the name of evolution constructs an unseen language wall, and forces people to “spontaneously” self-reform through evolutionary thinking if they didn’t want to be excluded from the national community, for the purpose of a kind of political and historical utopia in specific periods.

Human conception of what it is to be human is predicated on a homocentric logic that has its genesis in the Western philosophical tradition, specifically Greco-Roman thought. Awareness of the Anthropocene, the unmistakable realization that we as a species has been instrumental in altering, even to an extent, destroying the earth that we inhabit forces us to interrogate these received notions. While the world is fast hurtling towards a point of climatic no return, we might be able to put a break on or deflect the trajectory by redefining the human. Discarding the concept of man as occupying the apex of creation in favour of indigenous conceptions could be critical. However, given today’s reality, indigenizing the idea of what it is to be human can be a fraught exercise. Indigenous communities have existed in self-contained and self-sustaining groups and their thought and life style reflect that reality. This might not prove to be viable for large societies or a globalized world. This paper proposes to examine the concept of being human reflected in narratives and knowledges drawn from the Vedic heritage in India. The Vedas encapsulate a philosophy and a thought process that has withstood the test of time. The philosophy that it embodies has impacted even major religions like Buddhism. This paper will examine the challenges that confront man in the Anthropocene and suggest ways of redefining the human based on the world views and wisdom perspectives evident in ancient Vedic texts (The Vedas is estimated to have been written between 1500 and 1200 BCE). 

In his 1935 lecture on “La formation de l’homme moderne,” Paul Valéry says that the distinction between modern and primitive mindsets is vaguer than often thought. “Civilized nations,” he claims, contain numerous people whose modes of thought are barely different from the “primitive” ways of thinking described in anthropological texts on remote peoples. As a corrective to the idea of the modern, Valéry advances another concept: the contemporary. Valéry meant “the contemporary” as a critique of anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s separation of humankind into “civilized” and “primitive” ways of thinking, as well as of the rise of fascism in Central and Western Europe, part of what Valéry deemed “le naufrage de la civilisation moderne.” But the very year Valéry gave his address, literature written in French, including many of Valéry’s works, overtook Russian to become the most translated body of literature into Japanese. French literature’s triumph occurred even as the militarist Japanese government, the unfortunate outcome of Japan’s modernization that began with the 1868 Meiji Restoration, encouraged Japanese intellectuals to assert the incomparability of Japan and Japanese culture. In recent years, scholars of modernism have, like Valéry, promoted “the contemporary” to include more non-Western artists, critics, and writers in discussions of modern literature. By looking at texts written in French and Japanese from 1935 to 1950, this paper tries to deploy the contemporary differently: to see whether the contemporary can be put into a fruitful opposition with the concept of modernity, and whether that opposition can produce new ways of thinking of art and literature produced during the first half of the twentieth century in Europe, Asia, and beyond.